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THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 



WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



THE POETRY OF THE ORIENT. A Critical and 
Historical Introduction to Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian 
Poetry. Illustrated by several hundreds of characteristic 
specimens. One volume. i6mo. Fourth edition. Price, 
$1.50. 

THE GENIUS OF SOLITUDE. One volume. 
T6mo. Ninth edition. Price, $1.50. 

THE FRIENDSHIPS OF WOMEN. One volume. 
i6mo. Ninth edition. Price, $1.50. 

A CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE 
OF A FUTURE LIFE. One volume. 8vo. Eleventh 
edition. Price, $3.50. 

LEGISLATIVE PRAYERS. One volume. i6mo. 
Second edition. Price, $1.50. 

LIFE OF EDWIN FORREST, The American Tra- 
gedian : with a Critical History of the Dramatic Art. 
Two volumes. 8vo. With Portraits and Steel Plates. 
Price, $10.00. 



THE 



SCHOOL OF LIFE 



BY 



WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER. 



* 



The universe, all glittering through with stars, 
Is kept by God, an everlasting school : 
This truth, but that its fruit his folly mars, 
Would make a wise man out of every fool. 



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BOSTON: 
ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1881. 



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$ 



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Copyright, 1881, 
By Roberts Brothers. 



University Press : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



THE AUTHOR 

INSCRIBES THIS LITTLE BOOK 
&o $ttf|il0, 

WITH SYMPATHY FOR THEIR AIMS, 

^nb to %fat\zx% t 

WITH REVERENCE FOR THEIR PROFESSION. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Introduction n 

Rooms in the School 14 

The Founder of the School 25 

The Providential Teachers 26 

General Teachers 33 

Special Teachers • • 35 

Two Incitements of the Teacher ... 36 

Cruelty and Kindness in Teachers . . 37 

Education the Business of Life .... 39 

Books in the School 41 

Studies in the School of Life .... 46 
Chief Lessons taught in the School . . • 55 

Lesson of Docility 56 

Lesson of Energy 64 

Lesson of Submission 66 

Lesson of Faith 70 

Lesson of Love 74 

Lesson of Exemplification 78 

The Infallible Judge 82 

True Aims of the Pupils 85 

The Possession of the Body 85 

The Possession of the Soul 92 



8 



CONTENTS. 



The Possession of Society . . 
The Possession of the Universe 
The Education of Consciousness 
Definition of Consciousness 
First Stage of Consciousness . 
Second Stage of Consciousness 
Third Stage of Consciousness . 
Fourth Stage of Consciousness 
The Contents of Consciousness 
The Secret for developing Consciousness 
First Reason for educating Consciousness 
Second Reason for educating Conscious- 
ness 

Third Reason for educating Consciousness 

Motives in the School 

Desire to improve : Aspiration . . . . 
The Desire to surpass Others : Ambition 
Fear of Punishment : Disgrace . . . . 
The Law of Expression as a Motive . . 

Two Classes of Motives 

The Scale of Moral Ranks 

Rules in the School 

Epitome of the Rules 

Conclusion 



PAGE 

IOO 

io 5 
108 

no 

1I 3 
119 
121 

122 
126 
127 
131 

*33 
i34 
136 
140 
142 

i45 
148 
164 

165 
168 
200 
203 



THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 



INTRODUCTION. 

An Eastern vizier, it is said, once sent his 
sons away to be educated in a common school 
with the children of the people. Those who 
distinguished themselves by good behavior and 
rapid improvement he recalled to the palace, 
and made confidential officers of the Sultan ; 
but those who were vicious, who proved indo- 
lent and backward, he disowned, and left to 
grow up as shepherds, ignorant of their high 
birth and deprived of its privileges. 

The tale is a poetic and solemn figure of 
our existence. So humanity sends her children 
forth to mix in the level struggle, to be taught 
and disciplined by rough taskmasters, and to 
contend with the various problems that burden 
the faculties of intelligence or solicit the ener- 



1 2 INTRO D UCTION. 

gies of passion. Meanwhile the overseers or 
monitors have their eyes fixed on each one, to 
give him discriminated spiritual position accord- 
ing to his gifts and his application. Thus, in 
its very reality and working functions, the world 
is a vast schoolhouse and our life a continuous 
pupilage. This view is so large and free and 
beautiful that it is fitted to infuse something 
of the enthusiasm of the poet even into the 
dryness of the pedagogue, and fire the tedious 
routinist with a rich zeal. And this is a rare 
service. For no teacher or pupil should ever 
be a dull proser. Every one, wherever he goes, 
should carry the spring of Parnassus in his 
breast. 

The earth has frequently been called a vale 
of tears, trodden by mourners ; a desert, threaded 
with caravans of pilgrims ; a bower of pleasure, 
inhabited by careless flutterers; a gloomy prison, 
occupied by convicts on probation; a tent, in 
which immortal travellers encamp for a night; 
a ship sailing around the zodiac, the generations 
its successive crews ; a temple dedicated to wor- 



INTROD UCTION. 1 3 

ship, the human race its natural priesthood ; 
and so on, with scarcely an end. But, on the 
whole, no other comparison of it is so satis- 
factory as that which likens it to a school, and 
describes the business of its occupants as the 
pursuit of an education fitting them to graduate 
into the invisible university of God. 

Wilkinson has finely said, "Education is noth- 
ing but an assimilative career. The full social 
form is the blood into which we are to enter. 
The nature of the child, or the roughness of 
the adult, is the material to be admitted and 
refined. Delight and curiosity, with sparkling 
eyes and tiny gestures, come tripping forth to 
the time of their lessons in the classes of 
existence ; and there is no finish to education, 
because there is no end to the improvement 
of mutual good works." Dr. Adam, one of the 
schoolmasters of Sir Walter Scott, implied this 
figure, with a pathos nigh sublime, when in his 
last illness he said, " It is growing dark, the boys 
may dismiss," and immediately expired. In 
truth, the experience associated with the pro- 



14 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

cesses of instruction and training to which the 
rising generations of every civilized land are sub- 
jected, in their most plastic and tenacious years, 
is so varied and keen and deep that all litera- 
ture is full of imagery based upon it. What- 
ever most profoundly and vividly shapes and 
colors our consciousness is ever the richest and 
most effective source of rhetorical figures. This 
is a principle which no teacher can , afford to 
neglect. 

ROOMS IN THE SCHOOL. 

Viewing this stupendous educational estab- 
lishment, the earth, as a schoolhouse, the 
nations become rooms. Cities, villages, com- 
merce, agriculture, art, all modes of toil or 
play, all varieties of suffering and enjoyment, 
are seats filled with students. In the various 
parts of the building different branches of 
study predominate .and contrasting methods 
are employed. The great desideratum, now at 
length rapidly getting itself actualized, is the 
free circulation, through every apartment, of 



ROOMS IN THE SCHOOL. 1 5 

all the light, air, and benignant influence re- 
ceived or generated anywhere within the whole 
structure. With reference to this end, it will 
be useful to take a comprehensive survey of 
the outspread school, from a general point of 
view, before proceeding to the study of it in 
detail from the individual point of view. For, 
whether we regard the Calmucks, the Kamt- 
chatkadales, the Patagonians, the Otaheitans, 
the Norwegians, the Arabs, the Abyssinians, 
the Hungarians, or the Malays, everywhere the 
character, customs, experience, and destiny of 
individuals are found to be prevailingly moulded 
and fixed by the predetermining institutions 
and ideas of their respective nationalities. The 
stimulus from the public environment chiefly 
decides the development of the personal cen- 
tres. And how strangely distinct these are in 
the separated parts of the globe, so that the 
child born in Cambodia perforce becomes a 
very different style of man every way from 
the child born in Portugal ! 

Far up towards the north pole the Esqui- 



1 6 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

maux shudder on the bleak benches of Green- 
land ; and stern Necessity, with uplifted ferule, 
drives them to read starvation on the page of 
the wintry storm, spell exultation in dragging 
a walrus through a hole in the ice, write es- 
cape on the snow with their sledge-runners, 
cipher a feast from the entrails of an ensnared 
bear, — in a word, to work out a practical an- 
swer to the question how a livelihood may be 
wrung from such adverse circumstances. 

In China the seats are crowded by the mil- 
lions whom Confucius guides to tend the 
tombs of their ancestors, worship the sover- 
eign, cultivate tea, practise ceremony, suspect 
strangers, and be content in their stolid, mate- 
rialistic fashion, straying not from the ancient 
ways. 

India, still inwardly chained to the traditions 
of the past, though outwardly breaking away, 
brooding over old philosophy, teaches her chil- 
dren to mutter the mystic monosyllable Om, 
and dream of extrication from the wheel of trans- 
migrations for absorption into the Godhead. 



ROOMS IN THE SCHOOL. IJ 

Africa and Australia, so long abandoned as 
the wild playgrounds of barbarism, the revelling- 
places of savage war, despotism, and slavery, 
are beginning gradually to be lighted up and 
reclaimed by the most energetic races of the 
earth, through colonization, missionary enter- 
prise,, and commerce, — the luminous vanguard 
of civilization steadily pushing back the night 
and cruel chaos. 

Immemorial Egypt, taking a lesson from the 
finance and skill and adventure of the West, 
lifts her head above the mummy-pits of Thebes 
and Memphis, and makes pyramids and sphinxes 
echo the hum of unwonted enterprises. 

Marvellous Japan, at one bound throwing off 
the profound slavery of the superstition of four 
thousand years, assimilating the experience and 
science of alien races, starts on a career of 
brilliant and manifold progress, showing that 
it is never too late to mend, and that the fu- 
ture may at any time make new departures 
unprophesied by the past. 

Turkey and Russia, under providential dis- 



1 8 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

cipline, grapple to give and take the necessary- 
lessons of the time in the terrible tutelage of 
war, — lessons so poorly learned that outer 
peace but summons them both to inner problems 
more fearful still : for the paralyzing fatalism of 
the Koran and the besotted polygamy of the 
Court land the former in bankruptcy and help- 
lessness ; while the corrupt and cruel autocracy 
of the Throne and the rebellious unbelief of the 
people terrify the latter with the double spec- 
tre, confronting Tyranny and Nihilism, the 
desperate efforts of the one to repress freedom 
provoking the other to reach after anarchy- 
through assassination. 

France, long a pupil to the national spirit 
impersonated in beautiful and fickle Paris, first 
learns the divine truth of popular fraternity, then 
quenches its light in the blood of brethren ; 
at one time is baffled and supine beneath the 
surd quantities of pauperism, priestcraft, and 
tyranny ; at another time solves the problem 
of government with the bright answer of a 
republic ; then, betrayed by a false teacher, 



ROOMS IN THE SCHOOL. 1 9 

groans in helpless shame and grief under the 
retributions provoked by her conceit and licen- 
tiousness, — -retributions which it is to be hoped 
may teach her that Providence is a refentless 
disciplinarian, using the very vices of nations 
to scourge them into reformation. 

Great, instructed, regulated, despotic Ger- 
many, subsidizing all the resources of knowledge, 
skill, and obedience, advances with overwhelming 
force in front of history, to show the world the 
irresistible power of combined enlightenment and 
drill ; although the harsh blood-and-iron prin- 
ciple of her domineering bureaucracy threatens 
to convert what should be the fruitfulness of an 
academy into the barrenness of a camp, and force 
a democratic upheaval to fling off the official 
pressure which is becoming insufferable. 

Popular justice, constitutional liberty, mechan- 
ical science, and free trade are the firm quartet 
of teachers who, despite all drawbacks and im- 
pediments, instruct the minds and train the ener- 
gies of conquering England, as decade after decade 
she progresses in social sympathy and political 
righteousness. 



20 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

Poor, beautiful, proud Spain, once the most 
opulent and illuminated member of the school, 
the strongest and haughtiest queen among 
the nations, but now for two hundred years 
staggering downward and backward from the 
summit of her peerless sway, licentiousness in 
her throne, indolent and insolent conceit in her 
palaces, pleasure and murder dancing together in 
her laughing vineyards, her desperate efforts for 
regeneration and liberty, ever baffled by selfish 
pretenders and their factions, are yet ever re- 
newed, because the glory of her traditions still 
feeds an unquenchable hope. 

Dear Italy, lovely benefactress and inspirer 
of the world, matchless in scenery, clime, and 
fruits, in noble men and enchanting women, 
encumbered with the lustrous trophies of her 
own history, equally weighted down with pleas- 
ure and with oppression, long prostrate under 
the tiaraed Incubus, but now starting up with 
unprecedented promise in many directions, — the 
scholars, artists, and freemen of all the earth 
salute her from their hearts with an auspicious 



ROOMS IN THE SCHOOL. 21 

God-speed ! as they see her who has so long 
taught others begin at last to teach herself the 
vital lessons she needs. 

The ignorant and quarrelsome occupants of 
Mexico, Peru, Chili, and their kindred neighbors, 
convulsed and lacerated by selfish adventurers 
and insane factions, benighted with superstition 
and cursed with military domination, in a state 
of chronic misrule and recklessness, despise the 
instructions of history and disgrace the riches of 
their clime ; the teeming expanse of Brazil alone, 
under her wise and good emperor, a solitary 
example of beneficent stability and improvement. 

To the students in the sparse forms of Amer- 
ica, — forms that traverse a hemisphere and are 
sprinkled with the spray of three oceans, — glow- 
ing young Democracy, himself busy with studies 
and hopes, has set the hardest but most inspiring 
sums. Many of these they have already mastered, 
by expelling the savage, taming the wilderness, 
covering the wilds with industrial mills and 
blessed homes, and trampling out murderous 
rebellion; and they will never pause, let us 



22 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

trust, till they have answered the rest, by 
abolishing great social evils and showing an 
example of unrivalled prosperity, for the incite- 
ment "of other countries, whose teachers are 
less benignant, whose conditions are more en- 
tangled with discouragements, whose people are 
less ambitious and persevering than theirs. 

And thus the Father of men has gathered 
them into great national classes, which he is 
instructing slowly how to outgrow their crimes 
contentions and follies, collect their truants, 
reduce their insubordinates, and blend in one 
accordant family ordered by justice and crowned 
with delight. Would that all kings, presidents, 
prime ministers, influential publicists, were alive 
to their ability, their duty, their privilege, in 
respect to this sublime end, the redemption of 
humanity ! Then might we look for the speedy 
inauguration of that new style of governmental 
oversight and legislative direction for which the 
generations sigh through all their ranks. 

Governments, for the most part, have been, 
and still are, oligarchic cliques of the strongest 



ROOMS IN THE SCHOOL. 2$ 

and most unscrupulous men, who sit at the top 
of their respective countries to keep subordina- 
tion, preserve the statics quo, wring taxes out of 
the lower classes, jealously watch other nations 
and pounce on them whenever occasion offers, 
devising, meanwhile, the cunningest possible pol- 
icy to grow rich at their expense. But, in steep 
distinction from this form of rule, which tries 
to enable all above to prey on all below, and all 
at home to thrive at the cost of all abroad, the 
true type of government, the type we need, will 
consist of the wisest and best men, who will take 
charge of the interests of whole nations in a 
spirit of equity and sympathy, seeking to recon- 
cile the passions and industries of all classes by 
principles of universal right ; aiming not to dic- 
tate and oppress, but to enlighten and guide the 
peoples, to remove temptation and friction, per- 
fect the supplies for wants, create liberty and 
leisure, cause circulating superfluities and defects 
to neutralize each other in equilibrium, make 
cosmopolitan thought and affection extinguish 
the animosities of race and creed, and establish 



24 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

the kingdom of heaven on its only possible 
foundations, the solid supports of fairly regulated 
labor and exchange, free from the sloth and lux- 
ury now festering on the summit of society, the 
cruel hardships and wrongs groaning at the 
bottom, and the rapacious greed and piratical 
fraud everywhere rampant between. Office- 
holders, and their moneyed rulers, must cease to 
be leagues of conspirators to govern the major- 
ity for the advantage of the minority, and must 
become committees of experts to inquire, and 
teachers to instruct their fellow-citizens, how best 
to manage production and distribution in the 
harmonized interests of all. Then the most val- 
uable moral traits and social achievements of the 
different portions of the human family, unin- 
tercepted any longer by bigotry, may pass for 
assimilation where they are needed ; Chinese 
patience, economy, and reverence for superiors 
inoculate American conceit, recklessness, hurry, 
and intemperance ; Hindu idealism of faith, tran- 
scendent introspection of spirit, tenderness of 
sentiment and imagination, benignly modify Brit- 



THE FOUNDER OF THE SCHOOL. 2$ 

ish materialism, sensuality, and arrogance ; and 
in return, our Western precision of science, wealth 
of mechanism, audacity of will and enterprise, 
usefully stir the depths of Oriental stagnation, and 
displace despotic dreams with waking tasks of 
sunnier omen. Then the palace and the barrack, 
with their idle pleasure and stern repression, 
shall give way to the busy mill and the happy 
home ; where stood the arbitrary throne shall 
rise the instructive desk, while the sceptre and 
the sword vanish before the light of truth and 
the intrinsic persuasion of harmony. Then the 
world, from an arena where men are forcibly 
governed, will become a school where they are 
freely taught. No more will the stronger and 
shrewder, by force and hoodwinking, compel the 
weaker and blinder to obey them, but the wisest 
and freest will teach the rest to do what is right 
of their own spontaneous accord. 

THE FOUNDER OF THE SCHOOL. 

God is the founder and head of this vast 
schoolhouse, the world. His name, though 



26 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

often engraved in invisible ink, is over all its 
doors. He has endowed it for the perpetual 
support of a matchless corps of instructors. 
The night-sky is its astronomic roof, the min- 
eral strata its geologic floor, the blue horizon 
its meteorological wall. Birth impartially ad- 
mits all applicants for its privileges, with no 
entrance-fee beyond a saluting cry. Its entire 
contents — the splendid and terrible phenom- 
ena of nature, the many-colored and ever- 
shifting diagrams of society, the substances 
of truth and the romances of experience — 
form one complicated apparatus of instruction. 
And when they have finished their allotted 
term, Death bows the graduates out with such 
honors and disgraces as they have won, — the 
abandoned profligate with cold neglect or a 
condemning sigh, the public benefactor with 
tolling bells and universal tears. 

THE PROVIDENTIAL TEACHERS. 

Regarding the world, then, as a gigantic 
seminary, at which all mankind are entered as 



THE PROVIDENTIAL TEACHERS. 2J 

scholars, supported by the free foundation of 
Providence, it will be in order first to notice 
what Teachers are provided. For a school 
full of pupils without instructors would be a 
babel. 

The theme of man and his schoolmasters is 
too rich for us to do more than glance at its 
principal topics. From the moment the new- 
born babe crosses the threshold of existence, 
under the combined tutorage of instinct within 
and parental care without, to the expiring gasp 
of the old man whom religious faith teaches 
to die with resignation, man at every step is 
waited on by guardians, disciplinarians, men- 
tors, to meet his wants, chide his wayward- 
ness, correct his folly, spur his indolence, set 
him lessons, offer him rewards, and thus train 
him towards the attainment of the real end of 
his being, — the harmonious perfection of all 
his powers. 

First, our Desires are schoolmasters, from 
whom we cannot escape. To what investiga- 
tions and devices, early and late, they compel 



28 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

us ! And what sharp stimulants they employ to 
secure our application and our development ! 
Nine-tenths of the practical studying in the 
world are done under their sightless but po- 
tent direction. 

Secondly, Ideas are schoolmasters. The idea 
of God, as the omnipresent Father, educates 
the spiritual nature of every person into whose 
soul it comes. The idea of freedom, flung 
forth by ardent champions to battle amidst a 
careless people, between philanthropists and ty- 
rants, the idea of any grand political reform 
or moral right, proclaimed and opposed in the 
press and on the platform, discussed by ex- 
cited multitudes and meditated by lonely think- 
ers, stirs, instructs, and lifts a nation. To the 
soul that thinks, every thought, according to 
its character, is a tutor, foul or holy. 

Thirdly, Labor is a renowned schoolmaster. 
His hands are hard, and his face is embrowned 
from rain and storm, and his attire is rude, and 
his mien is uncourtly. But there is no deceit 
in his smile, there are no lines of dissipation 



THE PROVIDENTIAL TEACHERS. 29 

on his cheek, and his voice is as frank and 
wholesome as the shout of a farmer in the 
meadow when the notes of lark and robin 
mingle with his tones. In his vast forms mil- 
lions of pupils are ranged and kept busy with 
their studies. Plats of earth are their slates, 
hoes and spades their pencils, scythes and 
sickles their sponges. The more advanced pu- 
pils of this rough but most successful teacher 
are seen, in a selecter department of his realm, 
occupied with gases and telescopes, striving to 
reduce the furious forces of the earth and the 
passionless laws of the sky to the service of 
man ; while in the highest seats of all a few 
gifted students are seen at work, philosophy, 
poetry, and religion their materials, truths and 
affections their implements, social virtue and 
happiness their aims. Labor, from the rude 
beginnings of the world, has pioneered the 
steps of progress and taught his disciples the 
costliest lessons ; and though they have learned 
with sweat and scars, they owe him gratitude 
for the fruits. 



30 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

This great teacher has an insidious and hurt- 
ful rival, Luxury, who often seduces away from 
him the young pupils who should have remained 
his. Labor teaches those who wait on him how 
to climb bravely up those heights of wisdom, 
influence, and glory, which Luxury teaches her 
followers how to slide ignobly down. Luxury 
teaches how to squander in pernicious waste 
the fortune, faculty, and opportunity which La- 
bor teaches how to acquire and direct to noble 
ends of utility and beauty. It makes a mighty 
difference whether one chooses as his school- 
room the chamber of indulgence or the work- 
shop of toil. 

Fourthly, Experience is a schoolmaster, the 
most ancient, severe, wise, and constant of all 
we have, keeping open session for the whole 
race, with never a vacation nor an absence. 
Whoever would consult with this sure teacher 
will always find him ready. Those who will 
learn of no other are sometimes forced to learn 
of him, and he is hard and bitter then. He 
has a multitude of sub-masters, through whom 



THE PROVIDENTIAL TEACHERS. 3 1 

he dispenses his instructions ; and a motley set 
they are, — of good and ill, joy and sorrow, 
clearness and mystery, fact and illusion, dis- 
appointment and triumph. Now, at his order, 
pain teaches the burnt child to dread the fire ; 
and again, a thrill of pleasure encourages the 
good man to repeat a kind deed. At one 
moment he commands reflection to make an 
unhappy pupil drink "adversity's sweet milk, 
philosophy;" at another moment he sends ret- 
ribution to make a spoiled darling of indulgence 
eat satiety's bitter ashes, remorse. Experience 
is the greatest and most incessant of teachers. 
He has authority over the human pupil from 
the first breath to the last sigh ; and his in- 
structions are limited only by the measure of 
our docility. For, after all, as has been said, 
it is less the skill of the teacher than the 
aptness of the pupil that secures the result. 
An antique fresco fitly caricatures Seneca, as 
teacher of Nero, under the image of a butter- 
fly serving as charioteer to a dragon. In con- 
trast with this, how beautiful and happy was 



32 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

the relation, painted by the Greek mythologists, 
between the good Cheiron, the expert old Cen- 
taur, and his beloved pupil, the prompt and 
grateful young Achilles ! Let no one forget 
that the fruits of experience spoil if gathered 
too late. 

Fifthly, Example, or Social Influence, is a 
most subtle and powerful teacher. Society is 
a mutual school, where all the members are al- 
ternately pupils and teachers. In the alliances 
and rivalries of business, in the conflicts and 
friendships of life, by our public and private 
examples, by conversational interchanges of 
experience, by hostile criticisms and friendly 
encouragements, now we instruct and now we 
learn. Two neighbors going out and coming 
in before each other will constantly impart and 
receive information and impulse — educational 
influences — by the characteristics they exhibit, 
the ends they follow, the policies they adopt, 
the scorns they express, the arguments they 
hold together, the worship they pay. Every 
human presence exerts its magnetism, benefi- 



GENERAL TEACHERS. 33 

cent or injurious. Indeed, characters breathe 
and absorb such contagious influences, to in- 
fect or to enrich, that companionship is often 
more important than preceptorship. 



GENERAL TEACHERS. 

But in this common, mutual, monitorial school 
of civilized society some individuals are called 
by their position and endowment to be pre- 
eminently teachers ; and no office is more beau- 
tiful and lordly than theirs. Not one in the 
long line of the popes forms a more lovely and 
august picture than Gregory, in the depth of 
the Dark Ages, publishing his chants, and 
training choirs to sing them ; for he thus stood 
out before the world as the paternal school- 
master of Christendom. Great men, the lau- 
relled heads of immortal genius, lifted above the 
roaring flood of decay, are emphatically the 
teachers of our race. A master like Arnold 
of Rugby wields a benign sway over the whole 
future of his native land. A pastor like Ober- 
3 



34 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

lin dispenses instruction and sets an example 
which shed a beneficent moral power through 
long succeeding generations of the country in 
which he lives and dies. A saint like Am- 
brose, by the life he leads and the spirit he 
breathes, inculcates through the public air of 
history the highest truths of religion. A met- 
aphysician like Aristotle trains the minds of 
whole ages and nations. A poet like Dante 
exerts more influence to touch hearts, kindle im- 
aginations, exercise intellects, and mould souls 
than ten thousand technical pedagogues and 
mental hammerers. A philosopher like Newton 
enlightens the world. An inventor like him who 
devised the art of printing permanently goes 
on educating mankind. The founder of a re- 
ligion, like Mohammed, converts entire coun- 
tries into a huge catechetical school, where he 
sits in magisterial chair as the centuries roll 
away ; and at his nod a million obedient tutors 
indoctrinate and drill the people in the ways 
he has appointed. 



SPECIAL TEACHERS. 35 



SPECIAL TEACHERS. 

In addition to the solemn world-preceptors 
thus furnished and supported by Providence, 
— Desire, Thought, Labor, Experience, and Ex- 
ample, the five divine professors who still stay 
in their offices when thousands of classes have 
come and gone, — there is, speaking more lit- 
erally, a body of dedicated teachers whose spe- 
cific business it is to teach other persons. No 
recognized class of men deserves to take prece- 
dence of these, or can more peremptorily chal- 
lenge our respect and gratitude. This is true 
in the highest degree of those who bring to 
their work not a mere empiric repetition and 
mechanical faithfulness, but a living mastery and 
application of ends and motives. An example 
of fresh, competent perception of ultimate laws 
and methods generates in those who see it an 
assimilating enthusiasm scarcely possible other- 
wise. An instructor without insight of prin- 
ciples, as Delsarte said, is like an ape showing 
a magic lantern. 



36 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 



TWO INCITEMENTS OF THE TEACHER. 

Every thoughtful teacher has two great in- 
citements to earnestness in his work : one 
arising from what he knows, and one from 
what he does not know. He knows, that, re- 
gardless of all incidental considerations, it is his 
duty to devote himself with a consecrating zeal 
to the discharge of his function towards his 
pupils. The knowledge of this simple moral ob- 
ligation is an inducement which should suffice 
for an honorable mind. But then the thought 
of his ignorance on one vital point adds another 
powerful motive ; for he does not know what 
prodigious consequences of good or of ill, to his 
country and his kind, may depend on his fidelity 
or neglect. That pupil, now plastic for his 
moulding, may have in him the making of a 
Plato, a Milton, a Watt ; or may be capable 
of becoming a plotter of immeasurable treasons 
and mischiefs. 

A considerate tutor trains his ward according 



CRUELTY AND KINDNESS. . 37 

to his antecedents and his destiny : the son of a 
trader, for the counting-room and the ledger ; a 
prince, for the reception-chamber and the trun- 
cheon. Now the teacher should remember that 
even of the meanest clad and wretchedest class, 
every one is the child of an infinite King and 
the heir of an immortal empire. Each descends 
from God and inherits eternity. Therefore, be- 
sides for the claims of his tender susceptibilities, 
he should be treated with delicate consideration, 
and an authority veiled in kindness. 

CRUELTY AND KINDNESS IN TEACHERS. 

In the recollection of how many men, in 
the experience of how many soft and timid 
youths, tragedies are held in this simple phrase, 
— the cruel teacher ! It conjures up a mien in 
which no gentleness is, a terrifying frown, a 
harsh voice, a loaded ruler ; and the cheek is 
blanched, and the poor heart throbs at the hate- 
ful remembrance. If ever bland persuasion, if 
ever patient forbearance, if ever firm and un- 



38 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

weariable sympathy, are needed at all in this 
world, they are required from teachers towards 
children, whose exuberant hearts are so easily 
wounded and discouraged ; whose wild freedom 
is imprisoned in a tedious seat ; whose flitting 
fancies are chained to a slate ; whose wills, 
played on by impulse, it is so hard for them 
soberly to govern ; whose elastic spirits are com- 
pelled to tasks as dry as dust, and a discipline 
not less irksome than it is necessary. 

" Through life," said the good Jean Paul, " I 
have keenly felt the loss of what Heaven denied 
to my youth, teachers and love." And alas ! as 
we look through the abodes of humanity, to 
what multitudes society is but a Ragged 
School ! Behold them, put at nurse to filthy 
penury, hunger and temptation their primary 
teachers, hardships their exclusive lessons, abuse 
their sole stimulus. The piteous spectacle 
makes our hearts bleed, and we sigh for the 
time when all the rich, wise, and happy will be- 
come consecrated teachers of all the destitute, 
degraded, and sorrowful members of the family, 



EDUCATION OUR BUSINESS. 39 

to take them by the hand in Christ's own spirit 
of tenderness and veneration, and lead them up 
to holier homes and brighter days. 

EDUCATION THE BUSINESS OF LIFE. 

The world being a schoolhouse, consum- 
mately equipped with apparatus and teachers, 
and containing the human race as pupils, the 
normal course of life is a steady process of edu- 
cation. The business and end of our existence 
is to learn. We are here really to acquire 
knowledge of the infinite wisdom, love of the 
infinite goodness, enjoyment of the infinite 
blessedness. That is, we are here to study. 
We are sent out on this earthly campaign of 
life to enrich ourselves with the spoils of van- 
quished difficulties and the wealth of captured 
truth and beauty. The innumerable suns that 
wheel and gleam through immensity are shining 
lessons set along the limitless ascension our 
learning souls must climb. 

Inexhaustible are the studies inviting: us in 



40 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

this primeval school of the creation. Every 
event is full of meaning, babbling, to the atten- 
tive ear, the secrets of its origin and its conse- 
quences. Every sound is a monitor. Every ray 
is a revealing flash. Every object is compacted 
throughout and written all over with truth. 
Nature is a transparency, ablaze with back-lights 
of intention and bursting with mysteries. In 
short, the universe is a moving congeries of 
truths within truths and good on good, every 
member and particle of which it is meant shall 
be known. The truths of the works and ways 
of God were originally arranged to be pub- 
lished ; and intelligent souls are called into 
being on purpose to find them out, and to live 
blessedly by them. There "is nothing covered 
which shall not be revealed, or hid which shall 
not be made known, or w r hispered in privacy 
which shall not be shouted on the house-top. 
There is a pre-established harmony between the 
concealed facts of science and the prying fac- 
ulties of man, plainly indicative of the Creator's 
will, making the grand arena of matter and the 



BOOKS IN THE SCHOOL. 4 1 

endless community of minds strictly a school. 
Swammerdam, in old age, — in a morbid, if not 
insane, mood, — burned all his manuscripts, con- 
taining the results of years of laborious investi- 
gations into the habits of insects, saying that 
God had hidden these minute secrets so care- 
fully for some wise purpose, and that it would be 
sacrilege to disclose them ! But clearly that 
wise purpose for which truths are hidden is this 
very thing, — that men should secure the devel- 
opment, of their souls and the enrichment of 
their lives by pursuing the clews that lead to 
them, and bringing them to the light. 

BOOKS IN THE SCHOOL. 

One o£ our foremost and richest aids in the 
studies we have to pursue is books. Before the 
eyes of every scholar who will ponder their pages, 
the volumes of extant literature, in many lan- 
guages, unroll their contents, showing him what 
others have discovered or thought and felt. They 
are the embalmed record of human experience 



42 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

and achievement up to the present time. What 
has been said of history is at least as applicable 
to literature, namely, that it is the message which 
all mankind delivers to every man. No student 
can afford to despise or neglect books. Yet, 
when we regard individual nobility, new con- 
quests, fresh appreciation of truth and beauty, 
books are but the humbler auxiliaries of the 
school. And the earnest pupil who combines an 
inward-looking mind with an outward-observing 
sensibility will, wherever he touches 

" This our life, exempt from public haunt, 
Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing." 

Nature is the original text-book in the school 
of life, of which all others are but secondary and 
imperfect transcripts. That inexhaustible volume 
is divided into the different parts of earth, 
water, air, and ethereal medium, — the mineral, 
vegetable, animal, human, and divine kingdoms. 
The diligent scholar, with poetic soul, wandering 
in the dusty, sun-gilt alcoves of time and the 
world, may always say, — 



BOOKS IN THE SCHOOL. 43 

" My library is large and full ; 
And ever, as a hermit plods, 
I read until my eyes are dull 

With tears, for all these tomes are God's." 

The original books of science are the objects 
and phenomena themselves written by the Crea- 
tive hand. The material of psychology is in the 
soul ; of meteorology, in the atmosphere. The 
laws of music are proclaimed by vibratory bodies. 
The .facts of physiology are incarnate in our 
frames. The story and life of a nation exhibit 
the principles of political economy. Flowering 
plants publish the truths of botany with their fra- 
grant petals. The science of astronomy is en- 
acted around us in the azure and golden-orbed 
orrery of space. In this way, we see, truth is 
everywhere waiting for us to apprehend it, and 
to appropriate its uses while we worship its Au- 
thor. In this glorious work there is no termi- 
nation ; for the deepest scholar, reviewing his 
multifarious lore, must still modestly declare, 
with Shakespeare's soothsayer, — 

" In nature's infinite book of secrecy 
A little I can read." 



44 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

No doubt the incessant reading in our day is 
weakening the vigor and tenacity of the facul- 
ties. More direct experience, and patient atten- 
tion to it, less dissipated poring over printed pages, 
are wants of the time. Pedantry is a dry pulver- 
ization of all the powers of fruitful intelligence, 
sentiment, and enthusiasm. One need not study 
hydrostatics to learn to swim. Perhaps the sym- 
bolism of Odin forced to leave his eye in pledge 
with Mimir means that absorption in literature 
destroys insight for nature. 

The worst influence of books is seen when, 
instead of stimulating the feelings and illuminat- 
ing the perceptions of the student, they overlay* 
befog, and soak his powers. This oftenest results 
from that dawdling habit of passive reading which 
is so serious and so common a waste. Multi- 
tudes of persons in our day spend a considerable 
share of their time in turning over the pages of 
reviews, magazines, and books, listlessly scanning 
their contents, with no girded attention, resolute 
discrimination, or patient attempt to estimate and 
retain, but suffering the words to make such im- 



BOOKS IN THE SCHOOL. 45 

pressions as they can, and then for the greater 
part pass into oblivion. Under the dominion of 
such a habit, the mind tends to become a mere 
muddle. To read argumentative works in this 
way demoralizes the faculties of the intellect, and 
to read sensational works so debauches the emo- 
tions of the soul. A lazy voluptuary may sleepily 
observe and applaud a company of athletes at 
their gymnastic feats, while his torpid habits are 
reducing his own muscles to strings of jelly, and 
his connective tissue to a mush. So the reader 
of books will get little good from them unless he 
reproduces by the positive action of his own fac- 
ulties the mental processes of the authors, verify- 
ing their conclusions for himself, and assimilating 
for his conscious growth in knowledge and power 
whatever nutritious substance they contain. The 
most cogent inductions, the most poetic pictures, 
the most eloquent appeals, are useless if the pu- 
pils approach them with reason relaxed, imagi- 
nation asleep, and affection dead. The best rule 
for profiting from books is, Read nothing without 
giving the alert and intent life of the mind to the 
work. 



46 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

STUDIES IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

The whole creation being the work of one God 
who acts by uniform methods, and men being 
made in his image, and working within their lim- 
its after his methods, it will be found that the 
entire realms of nature and art are pervaded by 
resemblances. Symbolic relation, or what we call 
analogy, is the echo of identical principles in 
different domains. When we have learned to un- 
derstand a principle in one sphere of experience, 
on seeing a reflection of it somewhere else, we 
can, with a profitable gain of light, apply to the 
new instance what we before knew of the old 
one. Now, illustrating this doctrine in the case 
before us, we may perceive that the artificial 
studies pursued in our technical schools have 
their practical correspondences in the natural 
studies of the school of life. 

For instance, what are the essential signifi- 
cance and aim of theoretic logic but to teach us 
to reason well, to discriminate accurately, and 
avoid fallacies, collecting true premises and de- 



STUDIES IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 47 

ducing just inferences ? And is not the moral 
equivalent of this, in our actual living, to follow 
correct processes for discovering the right rela- 
tions of the elements of our experience and con- 
duct, the comparative importance of the various 
prizes alluring us, that we may prevent fatal mis- 
takes, understand our duties, and wisely conform 
to them, ranking the trivial and the momentous in 
their fit grades ? Can there be a fool.isher fallacy 
than he commits who sacrifices health to money, 
or subordinates love to show ? And did any 
gowned schoolman lecturing in a mediaeval uni- 
versity ever need skill in the syllogistic art so much 
as every man needs proficiency in this more sacred 
logic, which should preside over all his voluntary 
acts ? Creation and government throughout the 
universe are the live logic of God, in which cause 
and effect are the omnipotent premise and the 
infallible conclusion. To trace these accurately 
belongs to all men as much as it does to any, to 
him who reads these words as much as it did to 
Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas. 

Ethics would inaugurate a just order in our 



48 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

conduct and its motives, while religion would 
breathe a divine spirit through our characters. 
Has not every human being as strong a call to 
the substance of these studies as any member of 
a theological seminary ? 

So far as the aim of rhetoric is to secure a 
fit utterance for thoughts, should not every man, 
not less than Isocrates was a verbal one, be a 
moral rhetorician, seeking to give just expres- 
sion to choice virtues and high purposes in lovely 
traits and deeds ? 

A science is the presentation of the laws of a 
department of nature ; in other words, the or- 
ganic arrangement in propositions of the correla- 
tion and succession of phenomena. Shall not 
the man labor as earnestly to master these ma- 
terials of learning for his eternal destiny as the 
naturalist does for his temporal profession ? 

Philosophy is to explain to reason what appears 
to perception. The abstrusest problems of met- 
aphysics are but translations of the ordinary 
concerns of men into a higher dialect for a finer 
handling, — attempts to interpret experience to 



STUDIES IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 49 

consciousness. Kant's great distinction of ob- 
jective and subjective is one which common 
sense makes every day, without being aware of 
it, in recognizing the fact that there is nothing 
pleasant or odious, good or ill, but thinking makes 
it so. Or, as the master poet causes the Moor to 
say, — 

" He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen, 
Let him not know it, and he 's not robbed at all." 

It is beautiful to see with what ease and with 
what point the principles of every school-study, 
from the fundamental facts of physics to the re- 
motest speculations of transcendentalism, may be 
moralized so as to teach man useful lessons for 
the guidance of his life and the culture of his 
character. How obvious, for example, is the 
spiritual equivalent of the proposition in natural 
philosophy, that a stream cannot rise higher than 
its fountain ! Action cannot be higher than mo- 
tive.. If we would be conquerors in the battle 
of destiny, we must have the faith that overcomes 
the world : that is, the stream of life must flow 
from the fountain of God's grace, or it cannot rise 
4 



50 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

to the reservoir of his acceptance. Contemplat- 
ing a man, like the founder of Buddhism, who, 
by the power of his organized thought, sentiment, 
and volition, lifts swarming millions on swarming 
millions, impels towards his standard generations 
after generations, we see reproduced in morals 
the law of the hydrostatic paradox, — one drop 
balancing an ocean. Does not a man, distracted 
with the attractions of many enterprises, whereof 
no one wins a decisive preference, the subject of 
counter motives, intending to do many things, 
but really idle, illustrate the principle in dynam- 
ics that the resultant of equal antagonist forces 
is equilibrium ? His diverse inclinations neu- 
tralize each other, and the equipoise result is 
nothing. Such an one, " to double business 
bound, stands in pause, where he shall first be- 
gin, and both neglects." 

The truths of mathematics are capable of 
striking applications to moral subjects. For 
example, since the whole is greater than any 
of its parts, how clear it is that life should 
not be frittered away in a petty regarding of 



STUDIES IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 5 I 

its details, but that we should grasp it in 
our thought as an entirety, with dignified 
survey laying its ground-plan and command- 
ing its outlines ! He is a mean man who 
characteristically deals in vulgar fractions, to the 
neglect of integers. Nothing can be straighter 
than a straight line ; and honest frankness is the 
shortest distance between the two points, a good 
design and a happy fulfilment. 

What is the most glorious of all sums in ad- 
dition ? To add to your faith virtue, and to vir- 
tue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, 
and to temperance patience, and to patience 
godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, 
and to brotherly kindness universal love. 

What is the direst of all sums in subtrac- 
tion ? It is when, in the examination of a 
man, the fearful subtrahend of his vices being 
taken from the poor minuend of his merits, a 
negative quantity remains. 

To nurture a prudential virtue while indulging 
an immoral passion is to take pains to heighten 
your coefficient while reducing your exponent. 



$2 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

Take the depravity and weakness of the human 
heart for your multiplicand, the temptation and 
idleness of the world for your multiplier, and 
your product will be the woe of history and the 
image of hell. 

It is so much harder to climb than to fall, 
to win than to lose, that we may, in many 
particulars, be said to do the former by the 
accumulating units of arithmetical progression, 
the latter by the multiplying powers of geo- 
metrical progression. 

One of the commonest mistakes of man con- 
sists in overlooking the fact that no number 
of units of one kind can compose a unit of 
another kind. An ounce of frankincense cannot 
be manufactured from a million pennyweights 
of gold ; nor can any quantity of wealth 
or honor constitute one grain of happiness. 
The elementary atoms of happiness are 
strength, health, love, wisdom, peace, and 
hope : no process has yet been discovered for 
directly transmuting money, noise, reputation, 
and show, into these components. 



STUDIES IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 53 

The difference in the problem of living, to a 
person of humble simplicity and to a person of 
complicated ostentation, is that the latter has 
many superfluous quantities and neutralizing 
terms to eliminate before he approaches the 
real solution. Yet there is another side to 
this truth. For the value of a figure depends 
not only on what it expresses by itself, but 
also on where it stands. The figure Napo- 
leon expressed a wondrous energy and genius 
when a subaltern at Brientz ; but it denoted 
a world-shaking fate when at the head of 
an army on the field of Austerlitz. Even a 
cipher standing in a rich place may multiply 
other sums to a prodigious amount. Still, it 
should not be forgotten that fortune may effect 
a thousand transformations in the equation of 
a man, and his value remain unchanged. 

Since division by less than one is the same as 
multiplication by more than one, the fraction of 
contentment can be increased in value as much 
by lessening the denominator of what you want, 
as by enlarging the numerator of what you 



54 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

have. " Nay," quoth Carlyle, " unless my alge- 
bra deceive me, unity itself divided by zero-will 
give infinity. Make thy claim of wages a zero, 
then, and thou hast the world under thy feet." 

The least common multiple of men is van- 
ity ; their greatest common measure, heirship 
of God. 

A lawless and obstinate man is a surd ; you 
cannot extract the square root of his whims, and 
so get at the secret of managing him. The 
best thing you can do is to cover him with 
the radical sign of dislike and put him aside. 

In the exertion of influence character is the 
measure of power. But example is the expo- 
nent of character, precept only its coefficient. 
A negative power in the exponent may hor- 
ribly empty the highest coefficient. A parent 
who inculcates verbal honesty on his child, 
but exhibits living dishonesty to him, will find 
his counsel barren, his conduct fruitful. An 
old crab said to her son, "Awkward one, walk 
not so crookedly." " Mother," he replied, " walk 
you straight ; I will watch and follow." 



CHIEF LESSONS TAUGHT. 55 

The asymptotical line extending toward the 
hyperbola foreshadows the mystery of constant 
moral progress never reaching its mark, — cease- 
less approximation to an unattainable goal. In 
the light of this illustration we may see how 
we should seek the loftiest end, but do it in 
the lowliest spirit. In other words, we must 
aspire towards perfection, but recognize our 
imperfection. The sight of that will give us 
courage ; the consciousness of this will keep us 
modest. 

Finite being is a surface of flowing points, 
every point an immortal soul ; and there can 
be no hopeless tangents of perdition, since 
God, as infinite, admits of no beyond. 

CHIEF LESSONS TAUGHT IN THE SCHOOL. 

Passing on from the other features of the 
subject, let us fix our attention on the central 
question : What are the most important lessons 
to be learned in this complex and wondrous 
school of life? 



56 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

In addition to the. innumerable particular 
lessons, useful in their degrees to different 
persons, there are a few general lessons nec- 
essary for all to learn, — indispensable for the 
perfecting of our nature and experience here 
below, also indispensable for our fitness to 
graduate into a higher department. These 
few chief lessons are of such transcendent 
moment to us, and are inculcated by our in- 
structors in so many ways, that it almost 
appears as if the school were established, 
and its symbolic apparatus provided, expressly 
to teach them. 



LESSON OF DOCILITY. 

The first great lesson, set before all alike, 
but adequately learned by very few, is the 
lesson of docility itself, the acquisition of a 
progressive spirit of teachableness, never to 
be laid aside. The lack of this is the prin- 
cipal reason of the sudden stop of most pupils 
at no very advanced station in the various 



LESSON OF DOCILITY. 57 

lines of progress on which they set out. The 
presence of this active habit, on the other 
hand, this open and assimilative temper, is 
the deepest cause of the surprising achieve- 
ments of the few who, long and steadily con- 
tinuing to improve, become the supreme mas- 
ters in their several departments. To be 
earnestly alive, eagerly attentive, modest, and 
docile, always trying to do better to-day than 
yesterday, and still better to-morrow than 
to-day, is to perceive the means of improve- 
ment on all sides, to appropriate helps or 
incentives from all sorts of people, and to 
rise constantly in richness of endowments 
and rank of performances. 

There is scarcely any degree of excellence 
beyond the reach of the aspirant who is really 
willing to pay its price. The greatest artists, 
heroes, world-benefactors, however rare their 
original gifts, have been yet more distin- 
guished for their zeal to learn, their indomita- 
ble perseverance in practices and self-sacrifice. 
Hundreds of others might have equalled or 



58 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

even surpassed these, had they only been ready 
to make the same efforts. Let any one blessed 
with sufficient sensibility — the raw material of 
all greatness — be prepared and desirous to learn 
from everybody who can teach him any thing, 
either by criticism or example, by praise or 
blame ; then let him continue to study, ever 
keeping before his mind an ideal ahead of his 
present realization, and he will not cease to 
advance until extreme old age. And there is 
hardly any degree of merit which such an one 
may not attain. 

But, on the contrary, to feel yourself superior 
to others, and therefore unable to learn any 
thing from them, to cherish the conceit that 
you already have knowledge or skill or virtue 
enough, is to be fixed in a groove of hopeless me- 
diocrity, surrounded by a wall through which no 
influences can penetrate for your improvement. 

A vital and watchful docility is the one vir- 
tue for every pupil in the school of life, prelim- 
inary to all the other virtues. It is the high 
road of advancement towards every perfection. 



LESSON OF DOCILITY. 59 

The difficulty of fully acquiring and keeping 
this spirit, the precious fruits it yields, and the 
fatal penalties of its failure, constitute a lesson 
which, in its whole extent, not one man out 
of millions appreciates. How many painters, 
singers, actors, preachers, writers, there are, 
whose productions at fifty or sixty are no bet- 
ter than they were at thirty or forty ! It can- 
not be that they had so early reached perfection. 
It is that, at a relatively low stage of excellence, 
they lost their stimulating ideal, and ceased to 
use the means for further improvement. And 
is not that a fault of which, in this boundless 
school with its endless prizes, any pupil ought 
to be ashamed ? We cannot with too great 
earnestness beware of the habit of mechanically 
following the usages of our own past ; for that 
is a habit which makes it impossible for us to 
learn fresh lessons and start on new and bet- 
ter courses. 

Ah, how many gifted and ambitious persons 
there are whose one fatal fault is unwillingness 
to take what they feel to be the humiliating at- 



DO THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

titude of docility before others, and learn from 
them what they need ! Who has not often 
known such persons, — vain of their powers, 
yet making no use of them, chafing against 
outer facts as the causes of their inner failure, 
showing an obstinate addiction to their rou- 
tine, a singular combination of profound self- 
complacency with a universal querulousness, 
angrily resenting every attempt on the part 
of their friends to teach them what they are 
slowly sinking and dying for the want of? A. 
modest openness to advice, and a resolute ac- 
ceptance and application of it, would save them, 
and lead to the successes they wish. But try to 
tell them this, offer them practical help, on the 
condition that they will practise your precepts, 
and they turn on you as an enemy. At last every 
earnest and noble friend is obliged, in despair of 
doing them any good, to leave them to their 
conceit, their caprice, and their self-created fate. 
There is in such an one — and it is aston- 
ishingly common too — a most subtle and pow- 
erful propensity to picture himself in his own 



LESS OAT OF DOCILITY. 6 1 

imagination as superior to others, and so he 
criticises what he meets instead of studying it. 
He has a large and complacent idea of himself 
with, which he is forever secretly glutting his 
mind; and this preoccupation causes him to shed 
even the most valuable suggestions, unless they 
chance to flatter his bent. Quite unconsciously, 
perhaps, but none the less really, he asserts 
himself and clings to his biases, in place of 
trying to pass out of his mere selfhood in or- 
der accurately to estimate all that is proposed 
to him, and to gain from it. He looks down 
on his advisers, and repels them and their 
teachings. Whereas the imaginative, practical 
habit of those best fitted to improve, and who 
do really make the greatest progress, is to pic- 
ture self as in presence of something superior, 
and to take the position of a disciple who is 
ever looking up, and welcoming whatever can 
strengthen, instruct, or guide him. 

There is a story, a little ethical apologue, 
about one Peter, a poor and ignorant teamster, 
who, dissatisfied with his hard life of drudgery, 



62 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

prayed that he might be allowed the comfort 
of a walk in paradise. An angel appeared, and 
offered to grant his wish if he would promise 
to study with docility whatever he saw there and 
to utter no criticism or censure ! 

Accepting the terms, he joyfully accompanied 
his guide. The first thing he noticed was that 
the houses of the inhabitants were made of trans- 
parent gems. " Why," he exclaimed, " this is a 
great defect : there can be no privacy ; you are 
all exposed to public gaze ! " The angel, with 
a slight frown and a warning finger, replied, 
" They who are free from sin and guile need 
no concealment. The glory of God is rather 
in exhibiting than in hiding." 

They passed on, and Peter next perceived 
several angels bearing golden buckets full of 
water, which they poured into sieves. He could 
not restrain his surprise and disapproval. " What 
a folly ! " he cried ; " the water runs out as fast 
as they pour it in." The angel sternly rebuked 
him for this second violation of his pledge, and 
showed him that the fine sieves strained out the 



LESSON OF DOCILITY. 63 

leaves and other matter floating in the water, 
which then ran underground in numerous chan- 
nels, all over the garden, to refresh the flowers 
and the fruit-trees. 

Peter hung his head, and proceeded for some 
time in silence. In a little while, however, 
they came to a gorgeous chariot whose driver 
was urging with voice and whip two pairs of 
horses harnessed on his right and left, one pair 
headed to the east, the other pair to the west. 
Peter forgot all his caution and his former ex- 
periences. Was he not a teamster, and did he 
not k?iow? In a loud voice he called to the 
charioteer, " Fasten your horses all in the same 
direction, or you can never move ! " Suddenly 
a bitter repentance fell on him ; for he now 
saw that the horses had wings, and as they 
strove in contrary directions, the chariot rose 
into the air, as was meant. It was his third 
offence against the teaching spirit ; and the 
angel put a bandage over his eyes, seized him 
by the ear, and hustled him out of paradise 
into the sterile place whence he had come. 



64 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

The human is admitted into the society of the 
angelic not to criticise or condemn, but to love 
and assimilate. The first lesson, therefore, is 
docility. 

LESSON OF ENERGY. 

But the second is the lesson of resolute cour- 
age, a working spirit of fearless energy. There 
is a multitude of ringing maxims with which the 
wise in all ages have tried to enforce this salutary 
lesson on idlers, unbelievers, and shivering de- 
serters. Fortune favors the bold. God reaches 
us good things with our own hands. Little can 
be done for him who will himself do nothing. 
The laggards are left contemptuously behind, the 
weak are remorselessly trampled down, and the 
cowards are omitted in the distribution of prizes. 
Like it or dislike it, this is the law, namely, that 
we must either resolve and strive, or fail and die. 

Nor will frenzied fits of enterprise answer. 
Determined, sober continuity of toil is necessary. 
The brawny arm and the heavy hammer are re- 
quired to make the anvil of our opportunity ring, 



LESSON OF ENERGY. 65 

and to shape the stubborn masses of our fortune. 
Uncertainty, timidity, laziness, and enervation 
are the most fatal betrayers of men, while a be- 
lieving and vital intrepidity is their surest guide 
to success. Volition must tread on the heels of 
desire : that is to say, we must earn what we 
would have by conquering the impediments to 
it and fearlessly seizing it. The optative mood 
should always lead in the imperative, a firm re- 
solve chasing a worthy wish, if we would have 
the glorious indicatives of victory displace the 
wretched subjunctives of condition. 

There are no obstacles which will not go down 
before the fire and charge of enthusiasm, hero- 
ism, clearness, and decision. Thrilling voices 
breathe from the monuments of the mighty dead, 
and thunder through the dome of fame the truth 
that determination, strength, and perseverance 
are the three champions of the world. 

Let us all take this truth vividly home to our 

hearts. We shall often enough need it. And 

yet it is to be kept in mind that courage and 

energy must not be egotistic or reckless. Rash 

5 



66 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

excess is as bad as trembling defect. Many a 
brave votary of high ambitions worries and 
wears himself fruitlessly to death by too great 
personal exertion. The most tremendous strength 
and heroism, let it ever be remembered, are those 
which appear when man foregoes all uninter- 
mitted private endeavor, and peacefully allows 
universal laws to make him their calm but irre- 
sistible instrument. He then wins victories as 
quietly as the sunshine ripens harvests. 

LESSON OF SUBMISSION. 

The third great lesson, then, which we have to 
learn in the school of life, to learn early and to 
learn late, is submission, — submission to the 
unavoidable limitations of our nature and life. 
We cannot too soon or too thoroughly compre- 
hend the fact that we are in the embrace of a 
resistless system of forces to whose order we 
must conform our plans, and not attempt to 
array our caprices against it. After the most 
puissant efforts of our knowledge and prowess, 
there are multitudes of facts with reference to 



LESSON OF SUBMISSION. 6j 

which we are equally ignorant and helpless. 
Herein our best wisdom is modest surrender and 
acquiescence. When our designs are formed and 
our actions guided in accordance with the organic 
relations of things, the truths established by the 
Creator, there is no jar in our course, no clash in 
our fate. But if we lift our rebellious purposes in 
opposition to the decrees of Providence, we are 
quickly made to know our impotence and to feel 
our folly. Man's freedom is tethered by law ; 
and at the inevitable limit of his energy he 
should voluntarily kneel in submission. This is 
a lesson we are slow to learn ; but nature is fast 
in teaching it, and experience thrusts it on our at- 
tention from every side, until, sooner or later, we 
become fully aware of its import, though it may 
be not until we are at our last gasp. 

Perhaps an illustration will cause us more 
vividly to appreciate this great truth. A man 
was once sitting with Solomon, the sovereign of 
the genii, when the Angel of Death, visible in a 
human shape, passed by, and looked fixedly at 
him in passing. " Who is that ? " asked the 



68 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

shrinking companion of Solomon. " It is the 
Angel of Death," replied the king. " He has 
come for me," cried the man in terror ; " blow 
me into India." Solomon raised a wind which 
swept the trembler whither he had desired to be 
borne ; and then asked the dread messenger of 
fate why he had gazed so sharply at the man. 
" Because," he answered, " sent to take him in 
India, I was surprised to see him in Palestine." 

Borne along on the swooping worlds of im- 
mensity, we know but little and are very feeble. 
But when our energy can carry the conquering 
banners of duty no further, one thing remains, — 
to practise the lesson taught so long, submission. 
Destiny quietly guides the acquiescent to their 
salvation, but violently flings the resisting upon 
their destruction. 

There can be no permanent peace for man un- 
til he has learned both in theory and practice the 
great lesson of submission to the necessary lim- 
its which hedge him in on every side, and to the 
inevitable disappointments he must meet at every 
step of his life. But when at last, be it early or 



LESSON OF SUBMISSION. 69 

be it late, he has really assimilated this profound 
truth, and transmuted it into instinctive habit, 
no matter what fortunes befall him, they will 
both find him and leave him contented, serene, 
and trustful. Ah, how sorely many of us need 
this blessed solace, and how terribly many more 
will need it before they get through with what 
the world holds in store for them ! There is no 
one of mortals who has not his visionary desires, 
his poetic dreams, his imaginative longings after 
ineffable things never, never to be attained on 
this rough earth. The finer and vaster our af- 
fections are, the higher our ambition and aspira- 
tion are, so much the sharper and larger will be 
the share of disappointment and sorrow we are 
destined to encounter. Nothing can enable us 
to meet these grievous trials without bitterness 
or resentment save that resigned and docile tem- 
per which gently acquiesces in whatever it can- 
not surmount. If the ordeal be hard, as first 
applied to our brilliant fancies and boundless 
hopes in youth, how calm and sweet is the tri- 
umph when we have earned the well-adjusted 



JO THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

and submissive old age which our poet has so 
charmingly painted in his verses descriptive of 
the sea, motionless under the morning clouds, 
with the sails of ships dreamily glimmering in 
the horizon, like the spires of a distant city, and 
as the vessels sailed on, with them sailed also, 
farther and farther away, his restless fancies 
and insatiable desires, until all had disappeared, 
save a few that, moored in the neighboring road- 
stead, rode at anchor, looming large in the mist. 

" Vanished too are the thoughts, the dim unsatisfied longings; 
Sunk are the turrets of cloud into the ocean of dreams ; 
While, in a haven of rest, my heart is riding at anchor, 
Held by the chains of love, held by the anchors of trust ! " 

LESSON OF FAITH. 

A fourth precious lesson our leading pre- 
ceptors in this world are commanded to give 
us, — .the habit of faith, the exercise of a ra- 
tional faith as a guide and a consolation in 
those regions of experience where knowledge 
is not yet attainable. How clearly, all the 
way through our allotted term, we are in- 



LESSON OF FAITH. J I 

structed to believe and to trust ! Nearly the 
first thing we learn to do is to place im- 
plicit confidence in our parents. We are called 
to believe in the reality of the phenomena of 
nature about us, the reliableness of the laws 
that hold the world together, the stable and 
regular beneficence of the order by which we 
live in time and space. Hinting gleams of 
a concealed truth and glory greater than we 
dream early awaken strange hopes in our 
breasts. Experience, reminding us of the bless- 
ings we have enjoyed, the conquests we have 
made, the deliverances we have received, the 
perplexities that have been cleared up, the af- 
flictions that have been compensated, assures 
us that so it will be forever ; that after every 
storm the sun will smile, for every problem 
there is a solution, and that the soul's inde- 
feasible duty is to be of good cheer, still 
looking for a satisfactory result. Above all, 
the continued inspiration of the Divine Spirit 
who made us always lives and works in us, 
forbidding us to yield to desperation, forever 



72 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

breathing balm, whispering promises, lifting 
veils, answering prayers, solving doubts, preach- 
ing glad tidings. 

But even beyond all these instinctive, ex- 
perimental, and celestial agencies, whose per- 
suasions combine to teach us faith, there is 
a central necessity of our condition which 
shuts us up to the same high and consola- 
tory lesson. For there are within our cogni- 
zance myriads of mysteries utterly impenetrable 
by any gaze of ours. Plummetless abysses of 
ignorance yawn around us ; tragedies of sor- 
row and horror burst on us, before which, if 
we had not faith to leave all confidingly with 
Omnipotence, we should be left without com- 
fort or resource. Childish, utterly contemptible, 
is our fathom-line of reason, our explanatory 
analysis, before the infinite problems of con- 
sciousness, evil, fate, freedom, eternity. Oc- 
currences throng in our daily lives which 
would lacerate our sensibilities with hopeless 
grief and mock our understandings with vain 
anxiety, could we not simply fall back on 



LESSON OF FAITH. 73 

faith, and, in spite of the enshrouding mys- 
tery, still feel secure that, in some way or 
other, they are right and good. 

For man, considered as a pupil in this sub- 
lime university of space, faith is a cardinal ne- 
cessity, — faith in his teachers, faith in himself, 
faith in his tasks, faith in his fellows, faith in 
God, faith in the attainableness and worth of his 
aims. Never should we allow any torpor, base- 
ness, or even treachery of others to prey on 
our noblest hopes for humanity and eat out 
the core of our divinest resolutions. However 
many may prove false and unworthy, still the 
True, the Beautiful, and the Good remain 
enshrined in all their imperishable glory. 
Nor let us ever despair of correcting our 
own blunders and improving our acquisitions. 
A voice from heaven tells us that there is 
time enough yet, because to be is in the 
infinitive mood ; while consciousness endures 
learning is in apposition with life ; and to heal 
every wound is both the normal office of na- 
ture and the benignant miracle of grace. 



74 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

Faith is, first, the mind of docility ; next, 
the soul of energy ; then, the strength of sub- 
mission ; and, lastly, the substance of things 
hoped for, and the infallible clew of the spirit 
that feels itself to be unquenchable. 

LESSON OF LOVE. 

Still another lesson — and one deeper, 
sweeter, higher, than any other — the pupils 
in the school of life are privileged to learn : 
and that is to regard ail that falls within 
their observation with a complacent good-will, 
wholly free from hate, bigotry, or scorn, 
assimilating for their own every good they 
behold. Here we come to the crowning lesson 
of all education, — the one which realizes in 
itself the end to which the others are only 
means. For while docility is but a means 
for advancement, and energy is insufficient 
and brief at best, and both submission and 
faith are duties conditioned on our feebleness 
and ignorance, love is forever the very sal- 



LESSON OF LOVE. ?$ 

vation and blessedness of the soul which har- 
bors it. Love is the fruition of our faculties 
at their goals. What unwearied pains the 
Head of the School has taken to instil this 
sentiment into our minds and to train us to 
practise it ! Love is the divine attraction of 
our being to its ends, the gravitation of souls 
in the universe of spirit. God has made each 
scene of beauty and each strain of music preach 
to the human soul with mystic eloquence, 
" Abjure every form of pride and hate, and 
open thyself to all gentleness and love." The 
wonders of his wisdom and the bounties of his 
skill lavished on his works are spread before 
us ; the sacred dependencies, sweet fellow- 
ships, and appealing sorrows of a common 
humanity are exhibited in our fellow-men 
moving around us ; the mysterious attractions 
of an infinite loveliness are let down on our 
contemplation in alluring symbols of accom- 
modated knowledge, grandeur, and goodness, 
— all to dispel our stagnation, melt our hard- 
ness, awaken our embracing sensibilities, — in 



J 6 % THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

one word, to draw forth every pure and generous 
passion of our souls by teaching, us the one 
essential lesson of being — love. 

The choicest attainment of man in every 
department or particular of his experience is 
an affectionate and admiring sympathy. With- 
out this last touch all foregone labor is lost. 
For love is the enjoying exercise of our facul- 
ties, the very essence of good in every cham- 
ber of the soul and every relationship of 
existence. The blockhead who loathes the 
sight of a book, shudders at a blackboard, 
groans at the suggestion of engaging in 
thought, can find no satisfaction in his school- 
life. It is the bitterest slavery to him. Every 
task is a painful penance. But the student 
who loves his studies, whose understanding 
sees pictures in geometrical diagrams, whose 
imagination poetry thrills, whose heart history 
touches while enriching his memory with wel- 
come stores, whose reason logic braces to 
sinewy vigor, in whose sympathetic curiosity 
every fresh fact o'f science deposits a new 



LESSON OF LOVE. % J J 

delight, — to such an one each lesson is a 
privilege, each recitation a triumph. Even so 
great is the difference of life to the man of 
trustful love and to the man of sceptical 
moroseness. Love is a conductor, joining the 
currents of the individual with the currents of 
the universe ; hate is an insulator, cutting the 
soul off from the kindly communions of hope, 
though not defending it from the vengeful 
thunderbolts of fear, but rather elevating it 
to be their signal mark. The snarling cynic, 
soured, scornful, discordant, filled with dislike 
of every thing, can take no comfort anywhere. 
Leaving the lesson of love neglected, the 
poison of unkindness neutralizes the good of 
what he has learned, and turns the bland 
goblet of happiness into a burning dish of 
gall. But the poetic, humane, devout man, 
who has expelled from every cranny of his 
being the wicked leaven of malice and dulness, 
whose soul, overflowing with cordial sentiment, 
embraces with its outstretching sympathies the 
fair round of nature, the brotherhood of human- 



?8 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

ity, and the all-blessed Father, — he has so 
learned the lesson of love as to have reached the 
summit of mortal scholarship, where he clasps 
the eternal ends of being in their progressive 
fulfilment. 

LESSON OF EXEMPLIFICATION. 

And now there is one more lesson for us to 
learn, the climax of all the rest, namely, to make 
a personal application to ourselves of every thing 
which we know. Unless we master this lesson, 
and act on it, the other lessons are virtually use- 
less, and thus robbed of their essential glory. 
The only living end or aim of every thing we 
experience, of every truth we are taught, is the 
practical use we make of it for the enrichment 
of the soul, the attuning of the thoughts and 
passions, the exaltation of the life. Yet how 
many there are whose actions mock their knowl- 
edge, whose practice belies their theory, whose 
condition, appearance, and bearing unspeakably 
disgrace their advantages and their profession ! 



LESSON OF EXEMPLIFICATION. 79 

It is because they do not apply to themselves 
the truths they perceive and which they are 
quite ready to urge upon the observance of 
others. When we do what we know, then first 
does it put on vital lustre and become divinely 
precious. 

The first lesson to be learned in the school of 
life is the art of learning lessons ; the last one 
is the habit of unflinchingly applying to self 
whatever is learned and personally exemplifying 
what it requires. But this is really something 
which only the fewest persons faithfully do. It 
demands more combined humility and aspira- 
tion, greater earnestness of purpose and conse- 
cration in motive, than most men or women 
possess. And nothing is more common, as 
nothing is intrinsically more dishonoring, than 
for people to have a clear perception of truths 
they do not obey, methods they never apply, 
beauty and good they make no effort to appro- 
priate. Of the throngs, for instance, who study 
the fine arts, how many put themselves in train- 
ing to realize in their own persons the ideals 



80 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

they see portrayed there ? Does one in ten 
thousand ? All but that one earnest disciple 
are vapid dilletanti. 

There are throngs of learned scholars whose 
knowledge is so much mere lumber in the mem- 
ory, leaving them unwise, unproductive, dyspep- 
tic, awkward, useless, uninteresting. There are 
multitudes of able critics whose discrimination 
is employed in finding fault with others. The 
illustrious Agassiz understood the science of 
physiology and the art of health as fully as any 
one on earth ; and yet, driven by a noble zeal, he 
systematically overtaxed his powers, until, at 
sixty-six, he sunk in sudden and disastrous 
eclipse an invaluable life which his marvellous 
and almost matchless constitution ought to have 
carried to a hundred years in full majesty of 
function. " 

After long study and observation of the world, 
I am forced to believe that the most inveterate 
and universal fault of man is the neglect to 
make direct application to self of every practical 
lesson learned. There is one moral 'connected 



LESSON OF EXEMPLIFICATION. 8 1 

with this fact, of the most momentous character. 
There have been many men who have mastered 
truths of incomparable profundity and value, and 
have taught them to others with the greatest 
clearness and earnestness, and yet they have 
died without producing the impression they ex- 
pected. Why has it been ? Because they have 
failed to incarnate and exemplify those truths in 
their own personal character and practice. No 
new teaching takes effect to win disciples, make 
way, and reform the world, unless its teacher em- 
bodies it in his own visible and breathing life. 
All emphasis fails to do justice to the impor- 
tance of this fact in biography and history. Let 
every aspirant remember that only the knowl- 
edge which we earnestly obey and fulfil in our 
character and conduct is glorified in its ztses, for 
us and for our associates. That which lies idly 
unexemplified is a mere load to its possessor ; 
and, when paraded before others, it becomes an 
ostentatious nuisance. 

Hast thou conceived an ideal ? Be not con- 
tent to preach it to other men, but worshipfully 
6 



82 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

pursue it thyself. Hast thou mastered any 
truth ? Rest not with a verbal celebration of it, 
but show it to thy neighbor transmuted into the 
flesh and blood of thine own life. Then, at last, 
it may inoculate him also. 

And so the chief general lessons to be learned 
in this wonderful school of human life are docil- 
ity, energy, submission, faith, love, and personal 
fidelity. Each of these has its own special 
stamp of attraction and command, but God 
equally teaches them all, and asks us all to learn 
them. 

THE INFALLIBLE JUDGE. 

He himself, meanwhile, stands over us all, as 
universal Teacher and everlasting Father, with 
love in his eye to encourage our efforts, and 
lures in his hand to draw us on. Nothing can 
be neglected in his omniscient oversight, or 
escape his unerring law. In that inner world of 
our consciousness, where he sits in judgment, 
justice is forever done to each one exactly ac- 
cording to his deserts ; for the facts themselves 



THE INFALLIBLE JUDGE. 83 

are the verdicts. No real injustice, therefore, is 
possible. The chief trouble with us is that in 
our slovenly external absorption the mysteries 
of this inward world of the soul and its amazing 
experiences elude our perception. We are dis- 
crowned outcasts in our own kingdom. 

Let us awake to the truth, see God within us, 
remount the throne, resume the sceptre, and be- 
gin to devote to the claims of our nature and 
the secrets of our destiny a study worthy of 
their inexhaustible grandeur. For this earth is 
but one little primary room in that glittering 
and indestructible College of Being whereof 
all immortal intelligences are the entered stu- 
dents. And for him who trusts to the eternal 
prophecies of the instincts that kindle his reason 
and warm his heart, there is no end to the 
lessons assigned, and can be no exhaustion for 
the motives impelling. The pursuit of greater 
excellence should be our supreme aim. If in 
place of this we take pleasure for our end, it will 
soon make a disgraceful end of us. 

"Ever higher and yet higher" is the motto 



84 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

which burns before every thing that has life. 
The interval from dust to deity, from nothing to 
infinity, can never be passed. And so through 
all the rising spires of form still the deathless 
spirit climbs with hungering aspirations, mount- 
ing along the links of the chain of evolution, 
unappeased, — from nebula to crystal, from crystal 
to flower, from flower to insect, from insect to 
man, from man to angel, from angel eternally 
toward God. 

This, then, is our work now : to chip off the 
modern faults of the body, wash out the ancient 
stains of the spirit, complete their union in all 
that is true and beautiful and good, and so pre- 
pare the angel already latent within us to be 
set free for the next advance. In this divine 
work let us beware alike of doubt, of sloth, and 
of all crude impatience. Doing the best we can 
with our own faculties under the limits of sense 
and time, then let us surrender ourselves to 
the mystic laws that operate in ways and at 
depths beyond the reaches of our conscious 
thought. Remember too that whether we 



THE POSSESSION OF THE BODY. 85 

work or wait, watch or sleep, One there is 
whose vigilance nothing can elude, — the Author 
of the Universe, the Artist of Minds, who is 
slowly fashioning all creatures after his own 
perfect designs. 

TRUE AIMS OF THE PUPILS. 

The succeeding point in our theme is as to the 
ends to be aimed at by the pupils in the school 
of life. What are the proper objects of our work 
here ? No other consideration can be superior 
in importance to this one. It is of the pro- 
foundest consequence that our conclusions in 
this particular be sound, distinct, vivid, and kept 
constantly in mind. 

THE POSSESSION OF THE BODY. 

The first aim of the studies and practices at 
which we are put on our entrance into the school 
of existence, under the tutorship of constitu- 
tional instincts, is to get complete possession 
and use of our limbs and our senses, to secure 



86 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

the accurate adjustment, harmonious action, and 
free direction of our entire bodily organism. This 
task properly constitutes our earliest conscious 
initiation into the outer court of the kingdom of 
God ; for the material universe is the further- 
most term or limit whither God radiates his 
creative energies, and where the vast family of 
filial spirits begin their long journey towards his 
manifest presence and a clear share in his pre- 
rogatives. 

Little by little, the creeping, tottling infant, 
after many a timid effort and many a painful fall, 
learns to walk with confidence. But very few 
ever learn' to walk with that perfect grace, that 
exact economy of muscular exertion and nervous 
expenditure, which leaves the greatest amount of 
vital force at liberty to be used in free spiritual 
function. 

After thousands of rude experiments, aided 
by corrective tests, we learn to judge of the 
shape and size of objects and of distances by 
the reason-governed eye ; for, as Berkeley first 
proved, we have no direct knowledge of the 



THE POSSESSION OF THE BODY. 8? 

forms of bodies or of measures of space, — all 
such knowledge being the inferences drawn by 
experience from differences of lights and colors, 
hues and shades. The inexperienced child 
fancies he can clutch the moon ; the skilled 
marksman or billiard player calculates with an 
accuracy almost unerring. 

The compassing of this primary aim at physi- 
cal harmony, self-possession, and command, in 
any high degree, is neither so simple a matter 
nor so commonly done as may be thought. 
Compare the lithe, nimble, vigorous, blooming- 
gymnast with the pale, sedentary, flabby, or 
emaciated professor, or with the obese and 
waddling alderman ! Contrast a lazy sensualist 
of the city, whose most violent exercise and 
sharpest observation are a stroll on the prome- 
nade and a languid gaze at the passers, with a 
keen and sinewy Indian of the wilderness, whose 
pulses beat the march of exultant strength, who 
knows his way by the bark on the trees and by 
the nightly stars, who can mimic the cries of all 
the birds and beasts of the forest, and outwit 
them in their own wiles. 



88 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

In our modern civilization this rudimentary 
but indispensable branch and aim of human edu- 
cation is immensely undervalued and neglected. 
Common as the mistake is, it is the gravest of 
follies, because a very large part of all the good 
within our reach, however much it may flower 
into something higher, is based on the ground 
of bodily force and harmony. While we ' are in 
this world, a perfect body in perfect health is 
second in value only to a perfect soul in perfect 
virtue ; and it is most doubtful if the latter can 
possibly be attained without the former. 

An aesthetic gymnastic, drawn from the finest 
knowledge of many sciences and applied for the 
patient perfecting of the human- organism in 
form and function, is a crying and religious need 
of the age. It should be practised, year after 
year, to perfect men and women for the pur- 
poses of their own personal life, with the exem- 
plary perseverance shown by the circus-rider, 
the dancer, the actor, and the singer, in training 
themselves for the so much less valuable end 
of public exhibition. To possess your physical 



THE POSSESSION OF THE BODY. 89 

organism in full poise of power, freedom, and 
unity, is to exult in the divine richness of the 
boon of .existence. To be constricted, discord- 
ant, awkward, and weak, is to be miserable and 
rebellious. The one is a successful birth of 
providence, the other a wretched abortion. The 
man who can balance and carry himself with 
the unconscious precision and fearlessness with 
which Blondin trundled his wheelbarrow along 
the wire stretched over Niagara Falls, — the 
woman who can poise and move and modulate 
herself with the grace and harmony of a Taglioni, 
— has the first condition for a life of exquisite 
beauty and inexhaustible wealth. The divine 
power may be abused, as it usually is, for sensu- 
ality ; but it is equally indispensable as the basis 
of the most godlike fruitions. 

A constringed body puts the soul in pawn to 
a tyrannical self-consciousness which will never 
let it go free until the uttermost farthing of pen- 
alty is paid. The results of this are a great 
waste of the nervous force required to carry on 
the organic processes of the body ; and an un- 



90 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

easiness of spirit, an unhappy constraint of 
thought and feeling and motion, which make an 
awkward and displeasing personality. The more 
harmonic and frictionless the arrangement of the 
organs of the physical frame, and the freer the 
play of the articulations, so much the less expen- 
sive is the working of the vital machinery, and 
so much the larger the proportional supply of 
energy left for the transcendent offices of ideal- 
ity, spontaneous affection, faith, and romance. 
Our modern life, with its intense and relentless 
exactions and unnaturalness, is so over-exciting, 
that instances of erect and elastic freedom of 
body in persons of middle age are very rare. 
The average man with us is so tied up by strict- 
ures' in all parts of his frame, so imprisoned in 
a network of contracted and feverish nerves, that 
he cannot make a movement without feeling the 
chafe of some fatal fetter, which causes a resent- 
ful reaction of the irritated and rebellious self* 
whose consciousness is thus aroused and limited. 
Relax all these sinful and imprisoning cords, let 
a reposeful equilibrium change them into co-ordi- 



THE POSSESSION OF THE BODY. 9 1 

nating bands which blend the parts of the body 
into an harmonious whole, interacting in entire 
freedom, and the self-consciousness, no longer 
vainly asserting itself against baffling bounds, 
flows in happy function and becomes a playing 
centre of universal forces. 

The highest state of an organism is the one 
that generates the greatest amount of force for 
the supply of function, and expends the least 
amount in friction or impediments. This im- 
plies strength in the centres and freedom in the 
surfaces, with an open circulation of all the vital 
and mental motions between the centres and the 
surfaces. Now all volitional exertion tends to 
contract and harden our organic structures, while 
the law of gravitation is also incessantly acting 
to drag every thing in us downwards. A true 
gymnastic, therefore, should be adapted to neu- 
tralize these two evil drifts of habit by lifting off 
from every lower part of the body the pressure 
of every higher part, and by removing from every 
higher part the pull of every lower part. The 
desideratum is to acquire and preserve the ut- 



92 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

most erectness and unity with the utmost flexibil- 
ity. The physical gamut of a man — the strict 
analogue of his spiritual gamut — is the distance 
through which the elastic play of the parts in 
the whole of his body enables his contours to 
move to and from their centres. The aim should 
be to reduce to its minimum the opposition to. 
the free passage of. the circulating currents and 
the molecular vibrations. 

THE POSSESSION OF THE SOUL. 

The second end for which the pupils in the 
school of life should strive is to ge,t the full 
possession and use of all the powers of the soul. 
Parallel with the training to acquire the free 
direction of the physical organization, exalted 
to its highest potency and accord, there should 
be a correspondent endeavor to secure the great- 
est clearness, vigor, and liberty of all the spir- 
itual faculties. Man is not merely an animal, 
endowed with limbs, senses, and instincts : he 
is also a spirit, gifted with understanding, imagi- 



THE POSSESSION OF THE SOUL. 93 

nation, faith, affection, and conscience. Thus 
he is called on not merely to free his fleshly 
frame from every twist, cramp, or stiffness, and 
render it the supple and melodious instrument 
of the vital forces ; but likewise he must free 
the mental and moral sides of his being from 
every prejudice, bias, corrupt inclination, insen- 
sibility, or bondage, so that all his psychological 
faculties, liberated and illuminated, may act in 
the most perfect harmony with those laws of 
truth, beauty, and goodness which are the 
perpetual revelation of God in his works and 
creatures. 

This task is one of immense scope and sig- 
nificance, — to weed out all sluggishness, self- 
will, insurgent pride, deathly sloth, befogging 
delusions, sinful ambition, fires of lust and 
phlegms of stupidity, that the soul may be a 
pure, open medium for divine reality. But if the 
cleansing of the spirit from the evils that clog 
or chain it is a harder task even than to perfect 
the bodily condition, the reward is richer. The 
scholar, whose memory, stored with great ranges 



94 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

of learning, has ready command of its treasures ; 
the philosopher, who can think consecutively 
and deeply, grasping universal truths, and mar- 
shalling comprehensive systems of ideas for 
inspection on the echoless plain of his mind ; 
the poet, whose genius bears him at will, amidst 
visions of entrancing splendor, through the empire 
of fair possibilities ; the philanthropist, whose 
sympathy, extending to the circumference of his 
race, broods lovingly over the fortunes of the 
whole, — are as much above the brawny gladi- 
ator, or hunter, as the skyey Apollo, who seems 
made to tread the amber and crystal heights of 
immortality, is superior to the stooping Dis- 
cobolos, who gravitates sheerly to the ground. 

It is of especial importance, in this aim at 
getting the full possession and use of the soul, 
to avoid that very common error which con- 
founds the material conditions of good with the 
essence of good. Crowds of men, for example, 
are so eagerly devoted to the accumulation of 
the means of life, in quantities beyond their 
need, that they overlook every thing else, and 



THE POSSESSION OF THE SOUL. 95 

fail to apply the means for the fruition of their 
proper ends. Nothing is more frequent than an 
insane bondage to the work of getting money, 
regardless of the generous and holy uses which 
alone can give money any true value or charm. 
The avaricious slave who toils and moils to heap 
up wealth, without any joyous use of it, is a 
miserable drudge, no matter how big his heap 
of dollars is. 

Multitudes also estimate conspicuous social 
rank, political station, or literary fame, above 
unrecognized genius, ability, worth, and service. 
And yet how clear it is to unsophisticated 
thought that the intrinsic should in the sight 
of men, as it must in the sight of God, take 
precedence of the extrinsic ! When the incom- 
petent or the unfaithful enter illustrious place 
they make it a pillory. The lustre of the throne 
is quenched when the crime and vice of its 
occupant shed over it the infamy of the gibbet. 
It is not high and envied place that is desira- 
ble, but the magnanimous services and benefits 
which ought to signalize such a place. No soul 



g6 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

of real purity and elevation but would immeas- 
urably prefer to bestow a great blessing on man- 
kind, and receive no acknowledgment for it, than 
to be crowned with all the luxuries and honors 
of the earth while leading a life of corrupt self- 
ishness, inoculating the public weal with wrong 
and misery. Health, strength, harmony, wis- 
dom, love, romantic hopes, innocent ambitions, 
deathless faith, progressive insight, and generous 
services to others, — intrinsic goods independent 
of outer estimates or favor, — are to be coveted 
as beyond all comparison with the delusive or 
futile prizes of fortune and society. To invert 
this order is to subordinate the greater to the 
lesser, and sacrifice ends to means. 

This may seem, to the careless reader, very trite 
preaching. Worn and tame as the moral may 
appear, however, every one who shall be induced 
steadily to practise it, by striving unobtrusively 
to grow in the intrinsic excellences of his own 
soul and experience, will find the fruits it yields 
to be unspeakably new and precious as long as 
he lives. While, on the other hand, the man who 



THE POSSESSION OF THE SOUL. gy 

applies all his energies and wits to devise means 
to further his vanity or pride and surround him- 
self with gilded shams, must discover the world 
becoming, as he grows old, year after year, more 
bitter and hollow. 

Reputation, office, wealth, are but haggard 
mockeries when their possessor has not the 
intelligence, vitality, worth, enjoying power to 
make use of them to bless his own affections 
and aid his neighbors. Better trip it nimbly on 
your own elastic feet than be drawn, a gouty and 
grumbling paralytic, in a coach and four with 
liveried outriders. The very apple of the eye 
of wisdom is, through all the entrapping arts of 
the intermediate means of life, to seize the 
real ends of life cleared from every fiction and 
glamour. 

Another gross and yet constant fallacy is that 
of the scholar who makes scholarship an end in 
itself. The amount of what one knows is of 
far less consequence than the well-directed force 
with which he can employ and wield what he 
knows. No sum of information which can be 
7 



98 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

stored in our faculties is comparable in value 
with the free and harmonious activity of the 
faculties themselves. A learned man has knowl- 
edge gathered ; but a wise man has knowledge 
assimilated. The one is a tank ; the other is a 
spring. There was deep sense as well as keen 
wit in the sarcastic epitaph on Hardouin, the 
crammed and eccentric Jesuit scholar: "Here 
lies a man of blessed memory awaiting judg- 
ment" The interiors of many a mind are lum- 
bered and littered with worthless stuff, the mere 
trumpery of learning, an empty parade of pedan- 
try. To seek truth for the sake of its service 
in uses, beauty for the joy of its charms, and 
goodness for the love of its divinity, are the gen- 
uine ends of all inward culture. 

And we are capable of realizing this in indefi- 
nite degrees. Our power of self-liberation and 
extension of the psychical functions is far beyond 
that which we can exert upon our bodily organs. 
The exquisite marvels of intellect and sensibil- 
ity, the overwhelming and inexpressible wonders 
of experience, vouchsafed to the rarest types of 



THE POSSESSION OF THE SOUL. 99 

human nature, must remain unknown to all 
others. But what a stimulus to aspiration and 
toil must be felt by any one who appreciates 
the distance that lies between the rapture of 
the child absorbed over his toy and the ecstasy 
of the saint lost in the beatific vision ! 

The pupils of the world are exposed to such 
incitements of necessity, danger, pleasure, and 
hope, they receive the unavoidable lessons of so 
many natural teachers, that nearly all of them 
secure at least some degree of development in 
their nobler faculties. But it is painful, nay, it 
is amazing, to notice what a comparatively small 
number by their own earnest exertions co-oper- 
ate with the obvious design of the Founder of 
the School to achieve this end in the more con- 
summate degrees. To large proportions of man- 
kind the earth remains unto the day of their 
death an infant school. A goodly class, indeed, 
transform it into a grammar school. It becomes 
a high school to a smaller number. A se- 
lect squad keep on through the more advanced 
branches, and it is a college for them. But only 



100 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

the fewest continue to live in it as resident stu- 
dents in a university. Of all the inhabitants 
of the world, there are a million spelling in words 
of a single syllable where there is one compe- 
tent to grapple with the ultimate enigmas of 
our destiny, the sursolid problems of life. To 
become what we are meant to be, to grasp the 
noblest possibilities of our state and lot and 
make them real in living fruition, we must eman- 
cipate our spiritual faculties from every enslav- 
ing hatred, every constriction of dead habit, 
every fetter of bigotry and fear, and live in this 
boundless, teaching universe of God as fresh 
observers and worshippers. 

THE POSSESSION OF SOCIETY. 

Besides the full development and use of their 
physical frames, and besides the full develop- 
ment and use of their spiritual faculties, there, 
is another end for the pupils in the school of 
life, namely, to get such a command of the man- 
ners, customs, arts, trades, and laws of society 



THE POSSESSION OF SOCIETY. 10 1 

as will enable them to play a helpful and becom- 
ing part in it. No one has a right to be a drone 
in the hive of humanity. Each one, therefore, 
accepting or choosing his vocation, should 
then qualify himself with such a mastery of 
its methods that he can stand fitly at his post 
and render his share of service to the collective 
weal. 

A small portion only of the strenuous school- 
ing of the world is done within academic walls. 
The general germs of culture, the elementary 
principles of education, are there disseminated ; 
but the toughest toil is afterwards done by each 
student in the special school of his professional 
calling. The actor studies for the stage, on the 
stage ; the courtier, for the saloon, in all parlors ; 
the lawyer, for the bar, at the bar ; the politician, 
for the senate, in the caucus ; the physician, for 
the sick-room, amidst his practice ; the clergy- 
man, for the pulpit, not less after than before he 
begins to preach. The farmer studies agricul- 
ture more effectually by practical farming than 
in any bookish theory. No pedant or dreamer 



102 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

in scholastic halls pores over his manuscripts 
and themes with more intensity and perseverance 
than the devoted artist gives to the elements 
of iris designs, to the features of the landscape, 
and to the colors on his canvas. And then 
what disciplinary processes of tuition and prac- 
tice do a hundred million laborers undergo in 
the dinning school of the mechanic arts, in whose 
seats their sturdy ranks stoop and strike, spin 
and weave, mould and polish, plane and saw, 
sift and strain, from dawn to dusk, till their 
trades are learned, and their tasks are completed, 
and they rest in welcome sleep underneath the 
sod ! 

Thus every one who would worthily fill any 
office in society must study to acquire command 
of the materials, and skill in the practice, of the 
profession he chooses. And if he would not 
allow his work to become a degrading drudgery, 
a distasteful and wearisome bondage, he must 
acquire and apply to it two insights : first, a per- 
ception of the necessary and beneficent relation 
it bears to the common necessities and welfare 



THE POSSESSION OF SOCIETY. 103 

of mankind ; second, a recognition of the will of 
God in it as a part of the 4 universal constitution 
of things. The humblest routine of toil and 
care, the tritest monotony of laborious repeti- 
tions, is relieved of its worst pressure when we 
see it to be a means of blessed service indispen- 
sable in the order of society ; and it becomes 
sublime when clothed afresh in the divine sanc- 
tions of duty and love. The fabrication of pin- 
heads is a trivial and repulsive task, viewed out 
of its proper moral connections ; but when he 
who bends himself to it lovingly associates there- 
with thoughts of ministering to his family and 
his kind, and glad purposes of obedience to his 
Maker, he may become a hero and a saint, and 
find his hardships transmuted into a romance of 
redemption. 

But in order to experience this magic moral 
amelioration of oppressive tasks and make the 
dark and bleak post of daily toil a glorious 
centre of duty and joy, the vocation must be 
an honest and helpful one. It must minister to 
natural and virtuous wants. The parasites and 



104 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

the panders who diseasedly prey on their fellow- 
beings, the seductress who lures victims to their 
ruin, the purveyors to the vicious appetites of 
men, the gamblers and speculators who inflame 
the community with desire for discordant and 
unhallowed gains, the setters of the bad exam- 
ples of unprincipled ambition and selfish luxury, 
are necessarily deprived of this precious privi- 
lege. When gray disenchantment and the in- 
cubus of ennui come upon these, they can find 
no alleviation in that sweet sense of service to 
their neighbor, no sublime joy in that recognized 
obedience to God, which are able to make every 
honorable laborer contented and grateful amidst 
his work. The art of freshening and aggrandiz- 
ing the humblest and most unvarying lot is to 
contemplate its usefulness to men and its ordi- 
nation by God ; for thus we and our toil are 
directly associated with the beauty and grandeur 
of that eternal principle of uses which is the 
central revelation of the Creator and the source 
of all the blessedness in the universe. 



POSSESSION OF THE UNIVERSE. 105 



THE POSSESSION OF THE UNIVERSE. 

The fourth and final aim of every student in 
this world-school of life, the crowning combi- 
nation and result of the other aims, is to secure 
the immortal, ever-increasing enjoyment of a 
free and harmonious soul which feels itself to be 
a mystic image and heir of the Infinite. Here 
at last we really touch the nature and grandeur 
of man, and that sublime" goal of perfectibility 
which retreatingly allures him on forever. For 
he is a conscious centre at once in four worlds, 
all whose treasures lie awaiting his appropria- 
tion. He is a centre of being in the world of 
God ; a centre of sense in the world of matter ; 
a centre of thought in the world of mind ; and 
a centre of interpretation and response in that 
world of language which presents a concentrated 
and continual revelation of the other three. 
The laws of all these worlds, without breach or 
joint or seam, pervade the infinitude of reality, 
and have a consentient focus in every free per- 



106 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

sonality, whose faculties burn with prescience 
and know no bounds which they do not spurn 
with their insatiable demand and expansion. 
When the individual spirit, fully developed and 
equipped, in the attraction of beauty, in the au- 
thority of truth, in the obedience of right, in the 
inspiration of love, in the joy of liberty, exer- 
cises its powers, communes with its Author, and 
peacefully aspires to its eternal perfection, then 
truly, and then alone, is the inclusive end of 
earthly study and toil accomplished. 

The ultimate object of every thing for man 
here is to dignify and adorn his soul and ena- 
ble him to live better, exalting his conscious life 
to its highest maximum of nobility and bliss. 
Nothing is of any final service to him which does 
not help in some way to make him a nobler 
being, master of a grander experience, — having 
the adequate use of his body in nature, of his fac- 
ulties in the soul, of his relations in society, and 
of his being in the limitless universe of God. Ex- 
cept as this aim is in some degree reached, all in- 
structors, text-books, opportunities, are fruitless. 



POSSESSION OF THE UNIVERSE. 107 

Placed in this magnificent and mysterious 
school, surrounded with such costly privileges, 
how solemn, then, is the duty, and how profound 
must be the satisfaction, of so using our means 
as every day to make unfailing progress ! It is 
a dark and sorrowful fact that so many are 
vicious roamers from the door, and so many care- 
less idlers among the desks. Does it not seem 
as if mature men and women would be above the 
childish folly of playing truant from their tasks? 
Yet nothing is more common. With all but one 
in a thousand, said Lessing, the goal of thought 
is where they grow tired of thinking. Let it not 
be so with us. Let us ntft join that great mul- 
titude who stop short when they can count ten, 
fancying their education finished. Join we, 
rather, those choicer scholars who are advancing 
from the first signs of the alphabet and the in- 
fantile rudiments of good to the last provinces of 
speculative thought and the heroic heights of 
saintliness, where the personal spirit becomes a 
focal epitome of the universe, in breathing fellow- 
ship with God and immortality. 



108 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

Then this old schoolhouse of the world shall 
put on new splendor with each added year, our 
teachers appear more persuasive and divine, and 
the lessons and prizes held before us become 
ever fuller of interest and sweetness. Instead of 
complaining that we have* nothing to live for, 
the great aims of life will fill us with an inspira- 
tion of enthusiasm proof against every disheart- 
enment. And should any one ask us what our 
aim in life is, we can frankly reply : — 

" I live for those who love me, 

Whose hearts are kind and true, 
For the heaven that smiles above me, 

And awaits my coming too ; 
For the human ties that bind me, 
For the tasks by God assigned me, 
And the good that I can do ! " 



THE EDUCATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 

Summing up the previous head of the subject 
in one sentence, we may say that the collec- 
tive end in human life is the attainment of the 
good, the use of the true, and the fruition of 
the beautiful, regarding these as manifestations 



THE EDUCATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 109 

of divine being, revelatory symbols of God. 
These alone, sought in the ways of right, and 
crowned at their goals with the prerogatives of 
power, can make us really noble and blessed. 
For the pursuit of no other end is accompanied, 
as this is, by the freshness and relish of a per- 
petual variety, or marked, as this is, by a prog- 
ress never to be finished. Truth, good, and 
beauty are the divine philters given by the 
infinite Lover to souls masquerading here in the 
flesh, to make them love him. The effect of 
taking these potions is sanity, serenity, incorrup- 
tible blessedness. But for us to realize this effect 
in lucid experience we must not suffer ourselves 
to go blindly reeling through nature and life, 
accepting material appearances as the ultimate 
finalities of being. We must clearly see that 
all outer things are but masks and forms which 
serve as symbols to convey to our intelligence 
and affection communications of power, wisdom, 
and love from the Infinite One. All that ap- 
pears to sense is the speech of God ; all that 
is to spirit is the meaning of that speech. 



HO THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

In addition to the hints already thrown out in 
passing, we need further light on the precise 
method to be followed in the pursuit of our 
ends. We must see more distinctly what is 
the essential feature of the work necessary for 
the completest compassing of our aims. It is the 
development of consciousness, the rousing of the 
personal consciousness of the pupil to its maxi- 
mum of clearness and fulness in all directions. 



DEFINITION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 

Consciousness, in the deepest meaning of the 
term, is the intuitive grasp and feeling of itself 
by the ego, the direct thinking into, and taking 
possession of, its own subjectivity by the ego. 
But, as more ordinarily apprehended, conscious- 
ness is the play of changes in a personal self. 
It is an interfusion of thought, feeling, and vo- 
lition, in a centre of persistent identity. This 
self, or centred identity, is the mystic substance 
of our being, an indefinable entity, the constant 
though trackless substratum of the shifting 



DEFINITION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 1 1 1 

states which we recognize. For the support of 
a living consciousness, in the popular sense of 
the word, three factors seem to be necessary : 
first, a subject, or the self; second, an object, 
distinguished from the self; third, a relation 
between the subject and the object. The states 
of the self and the states of the not-self, with 
their mutual relations, constitute the woof and 
warp and woven sheet of the texture of our 
spiritual life. The self throws the crossing shut- 
tle of the woof, the not-self holds the steady- 
threads of the warp, and the connections of these 
make the web of experience. 

Consciousness is proportionate to the distinct- 
ness and the co-ordination of these three ele- 
ments rimmed with the selvage of individuality. 
The sharper each feature is in its definition, and 
the more varied and vivid are the combinations 
of them all, the higher and richer will be the 
consciousness. Vagueness, obscurity, and con- 
fusion degrade and deaden whatever they affect, 
coarsen the edge of faculty, and lower the rank 
of life. 



112 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

The omniscience of God we suppose to be 
perfect and absolute. He is infinitely conscious 
of all that is, both as regards subjects and ob- 
jects. We hold that the three distinctions in 
his being — love, wisdom, and power — are the 
ground of his self-knowledge, and constitute the 
eternal pattern of every free personality. In 
the unity of man exists a trinity of life, mind, 
and will — instinct, reason, and affection — cor- 
respondent with that of his Maker. The con- 
sciousness of each is a subject-object in triple 
combination, each of the three elements co- 
penetrating the other two. And it seems clear 
that our highest dignity and destiny consist in 
raising our particular individual consciousness to 
its climax, taking possession of our whole nature 
and its relationships' in the completest possible 
degree. God is power, wisdom, and love, in 
their plenary and illimitable perfection. We also 
are force, intelligence, and affection ; obscure, 
finite images of him, called to recognize, in ever- 
ascending degrees, the revelations he makes of 
himself in the symbols of goodness, truth, and 



FIRST STAGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 113 

beauty, and, by translating these into their living 
uses, to brighten and exalt the divine likeness 
in us to the highest pitch, approximating our 
experience towards his own exactness of vision, 
harmony of will, and fulness of joy. Every step 
of this work implies the cleansing, the enlarge- 
ment, the intensification, and the systematic 
rule of consciousness. 

Let us mark the progressive stages in this 
evolution, beginning with the lowest. 



FIRST STAGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 

The most demoralized and lamentable -con- 
dition of man is that in which the parts of his 
bodily organization are so perverted from their 
proper freedom and symmetry by contractions 
or disproportionate developments that their func- 
tions are thrown into discord and rigidly fettered, 
while the faculties of his spirit, in an inward echo 
of the same state, lose all but their crudest attri- 
butes and act with the extremest sluggishness 
and insensibility. Reduced to the animal ele- 



1 14 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

ments of his being, tied up in a confused mass of 
fleshly instincts and spiritual powers enslaved 
by mechanical habits, he blindly obeys the forces 
that act on him within and without, quite igno- 
rant of his own condition. This is the most de- 
humanized state, the nearest to a machine, into 
which man can sink, — chained, imprisoned, bur- 
dened, goaded, lashed, deprived of every precious 
prerogative of his nature, and not knowing it. 
Thus the extremity of degradation is coincident 
with the maximum of unconsciousness. 

No one can descend beneath him who is a 
perverted and insensate wretch, a beast, a slave, 
or a devil of self-bondage and lawless appetite, 
and is utterly unaware of it, — the parts of his 
nature all misadjusted and inverted in their 
order, — the free consciousness which ought to 
reign in light at the summit being trodden under 
foot in darkness. Here the man approaches the 
automaton or puppet ; the life is an obscure stir 
and fret of compressed functions ; the instruments 
of the soul, and their uses, alike are chiefly out 
of consciousness. 



FIRST STAGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 1 15 

The essence of this condition consists in its 
confinement and uneasiness. The stiff and 
awkward clodhopper, the ignorant and drunken 
boor, whose pipe and mug are the keenest com- 
fort their obtuse senses can taste, as compared 
with the refined and trained gentleman or lady 
who has every muscle and every thought under 
clear and full direction, are in a state of slavery 
and misery, however little they may realize it. 

The first necessity for elevating the victims of 
this automatic subjection, this deathful routine, 
is to make them conscious of their condition. 
As soon as they learn to appreciate the facts of 
the case, they will resent their bonds and aspire 
to liberty. A man leading a swinish life, and 
not perceiving its swinishness, as revealed by the 
contrast of something diviner, — a man robbed 
of nine-tenths of the richness and glory of his 
human prerogatives by a rooted baseness and 
torpidity, — may grovel contentedly on to the 
end. But let noble examples of genius, heroism, 
sacred service, romantic adventure, supernal 
faith, flash into his soul a sudden perception 



Il6 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

of their transcendent superiorities, and the un- 
wonted inspiration will kindle a new conscious- 
ness, causing him to struggle for deliverance 
from his old lethargy, enrolling him as a fresh 
soldier of the ideal. 

Under the evil historic conditions inherited 
from the past, pain is the pioneer of con- 
sciousness. Our conscious perceptions are first 
awakened and intensified by facts of slavery and 
misery, vexatious obstacles to our wishes. The 
chafe and irritation of these are our stimulus to 
seek for liberty and blessedness in the fulfilment 
of the ends of our being. In angelic life, on the 
contrary, delight is the pioneer of consciousness. 
The perceptions and desires are elicited not by 
obstacles but by gratifications. With them edu- 
cation is the action of harmony and pleasure, 
not the reaction of baffled powers. But with us 
to suffer is to become conscious, and strife is the 
price of victory. If this law appear hard, it is 
nevertheless beneficent. How clearly he has 
made a great step of advance and ascent who 
has ceased to be unconscious of his limitations 



FIRST STAGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. \\J 

by learning to appreciate the prizes of higher 
degrees of excellence and fruition contrasted 
with the foils of lower ones ! 

To earn by toil, or to receive by grace, any 
valuable boon, it is a preliminary necessity that 
we become personally conscious of our want of 
it. Unused the days fly by, inertly our pow- 
ers waste away, and the divine desirablenesses 
crowding the universe draw no nearer to us, so 
long as we lie stupidly contented in ignorance 
or besotted with conceit. But as soon as we 
begin sharply to feel our defects and covet the 
possible supply, the path of progressive attain- 
ment opens before us, and our energies are 
strung to their appointed tasks. A story in 
point is told of a king who had a lovely daughter, 
idolized by him, but blind from her birth. She 
had grown up to full maidenhood, kept sedu- 
lously from knowing her great misfortune. One 
day an old sage came to the court who promised 
the king that he would give his child her sight. 
But he declared it to be indispensable that she 
should first become conscious of her blindness, 



Il8 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

that she might intelligently co-operate in the 
needful process. The king sought to prepare 
her. " My child," he said, " you know that your 
feet are to walk with, your hands to touch with, 
your ears to hear with, your nose to smell with, 
your tongue to taste with. But others can also 
see, while you are blind!' "Blind, father," she 
asked in wonder, "what is that?" "Darling," 
he added, " what do you think your eyes were 
made for?" "Oh," she replied, "when my 
heart is full, the tears always come into my 
eyes ; and that, I suppose, is what they are for ! " 
With the tenderest painstaking the king and the 
sage succeeded in awakening in her the con- 
sciousness of her defect, and at length, to her 
unspeakable astonishment and delight, vision 
was given to her. 

Ah, yes, this principle holds true for all the 
multitudes of the world. While the vain, the 
proud, the insensible, impoverished and blinded 
by their incompetent self-sufficiency, remain un- 
blessed, the modest seekers and suppliants who 
clearly feel their own deficiencies, and trust that 



SECOND STAGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 119 

there is no pang without a remedy, no want 
without a correspondent provision, are enriched 
more and more with the choicest blessings of 
earth and heaven. The stolid materialist, 
absorbed in the scramble for sensual goods, 
unaware of his spiritual blindness, can never 
see any thing beyond the grasp of sense. The 
devout comrade of nature and lover of men, 
whose heart and imagination have been touched 
by a mystic feeling of the Infinite, hungers and 
thirsts after God, weeps in solitude over his 
inner poverty and loneliness, seeks for God 
through long years of darkness and sorrow, and, 
in consequence, finally wins that experience of 
the divine fellowship whose peace is deeper than 
plummet of thought ever sounded, whose bliss is 
higher than hint of language can ever reach. 

SECOND STAGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 

In regard to the education of self-perception 
and the introspective reading of experience, the 
lowest stage, as we saw, is where the organs 



120 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

and faculties, as well as their uses, are out of 
consciousness. Then the man is an automatic 
bundle, a heap of stagnant habitudes. The 
second stage is when he becomes sensitive and 
perceptive of his perversion, slavery, and degra- 
dation. When the eye is disordered by inflam- 
mation, in proportion as its uses are impeded or 
excluded, the mechanism of its structure comes 
into consciousness. A man suffering under an 
attack of gout, in proportion as his attempts to 
walk are baffled by the excruciating torture they 
cause, becomes conscious of his foot and of its 
unhappy condition. If he were fully aware of a 
satisfactory locomotion, he would not think of 
his pedal muscles or nerves at all. This dis- 
tressing inversion of the rightful order of things 
sharpens his perceptions, and educates him to 
shrink from the evil which is actual, and yearn 
towards the good which is possible. He has a 
wretched sense of the instruments of his being, 
but knows that they are thwarted of their 
ends. They work ineffectually in obstruction 
and friction. At this degree of evolution his 



THIRD STAGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 121 

organs and faculties are in consciousness, their 
uses out of it. 



THIRD STAGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 

But the third stage is attained when all our 
personal instruments and their uses are distinctly 
within our own free possession and direction. 
Then we knowingly feel and wield our physiologi- 
cal organs and our psychological faculties in the 
actual fulfilment of their intentions. We em- 
brace the means and the ends of our life together 
in clear feeling, intelligence, and will. We con- 
sciously contain our powers and voluntarily guide 
them to their fruitions. A consummate billiard 
player, or master of the art of fencing, has a clear 
and strong sense of satisfaction in his conscious 
command of the uses of his limbs and weapons. 
The convalescent who has recovered from a 
severe attack of dyspepsia often experiences a 
sharp and massive pleasure, a pervasive feeling of 
luxurious comfort, when, after a good meal, his 
reinvigorated stomach properly fulfils its office, 



122 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

and the reports of the happy digestion are sent 
all through his reposeful and assimilating organ- 
ism. It is quite obvious how desirable an exalta- 
tion this is above the horrors of the preceding 
stage of conscious indigestion. 

FOURTH STAGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 

This liberated possession and enjoyment of 
ourselves, in seeking our designed ends, is a high 
and delightful stage of consciousness. Multi- 
tudes always remain below it, constrained and 
uneasy in -their various degrees of slavery and 
misery. Very few ever rise above it to enter on 
that fourth and last stage which is the supreme 
height of experience, reached only by the rarest 
spirits, namely, that stage in which the means 
and instruments vanish in the very perfection 
of their own operation. Then our organs and 
faculties are out of consciousness, because the 
exquisite fulness and harmony of their uses 
preoccupy and absorb the consciousness. The 
element of self is reduced in our apprehension to 



FOURTH STAGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 1 23 

its utmost minimum, because our powers act to 
their ends with such spontaneous ease and ex- 
emption from disturbing limits and frictions that 
consciousness takes no cognizance of any thing 
but the performance and the fruition. 

This is the state known as inspiration, in which 
every action does itself so spontaneously that the 
subject feels it not done by his own efficiency, 
but by the influx and possession of some foreign 
power. Inspired genius is intensely conscious, 
but of its experiences rather than of self. The 
more purely any function is realized, so much the 
more perfectly it fills the field of consciousness 
unadulterated and undistracted by any sense or 
notice of the tools and the methods. But the 
bungler, just in proportion to the crudity and 
confusion of his bungling, is occupied with his 
instruments and efforts, and has so much the less 
faculty and freedom left for appreciating the 
things done. The clumsiness and bashfulness of 
the lout make it a fearful task and an intense 
agony for him to execute a simple dance in 
company ; but as the accomplished votary of the 



124 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

Terpsichorean art waltzes melodiously through 
the mazes of movement, the body and limbs float 
out of attention in automatic obedience to the 
trained instincts, and a voluptuous intoxication 
alone overflows the vessel of consciousness. An 
eye in healthy state and normal action is delight- 
edly conscious of the uses of vision, though not 
at all aware of the physical apparatus. The 
eager, tiptoe youth running over with life and 
motion is so unconstrained and satisfied in his 
moving that he thinks. not of the feet and muscles 
with which he moves. An inferior musician, 
playing an untried composition on a piano, has 
his attention so taken up with the difficulties of 
the instrumentation as to be quite unable to 
enjoy the music ; but an absolute master plays 
it so easily that his entire thought may be 
devoted to a critical estimate, or a surrendered 
enjoyment, of the harmony. 

This is the divine type of life reproduced in 
our human type, when the place occupied in 
consciousness by organs and machinery comes 
nearest to disappearance, and the place filled by 



FOURTH STAGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 1 25 

uses and fruitions comes nearest to monopoly. 
The adjustments in the geometry of the solar 
system and its working are so perfect and 
jarless that the instrumentality of mechanism 
and force is wholly concealed in the fulness of 
the visible effect. So the law of gravitation is 
impenetrably hidden in its own transparency, but 
its uses are obvious everywhere. God disposes 
his means with such suavity that the perceptions 
of the intellect can trace no effort, and attains his 
ends with such power that the affections of the 
will are satisfied. And this is the ideal for us to 
cultivate, the typical life of heroes and seers who 
have become saints, whose experiences are so 
adequate and complete that their being is ab- 
sorbingly occupied with satisfaction. Perfected 
fruitions of ends so free the faculties that their 
limits cease to fret the soul, and are no longer 
reported in consciousness. This is the state of 
ecstasy, or an experience so intense and lucid that 
while it lasts it monopolizes us and obliterates 
every thing else, giving to oblivion even the ex- 
periencing selfhood and the containing time. 



126 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

The incomparable height and preciousness of 
such an attainment reside herein, that it reduces 
the individual aspects of our being to their small- 
est dimensions, and exalts their universal signifi- 
cance to its greatest possibility. «■. 

THE CONTENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 

The evolution of consciousness opens to us 
all the heights and depths of immensity and 
eternity. It is the sole key to those transcendent 
marvels of experience of which such strange hints 
glimpse out at us in the writings of the Mystics. 
For the human soul is^ a centre of being which 
open outwardly into the illimitableness of the 
material creation, and inwardly into the spiritual 
boundlessness of God. And there is no fixed 
confine to the receptive capacity of the soul thus 
centred in the double infinity of the objects and 
subjects whose two receptacles are space and 
time, or immensity and eternity. 

What an inexhaustible gamut of states human 
consciousness can span ! It may be a stagnant 



CONTENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 12J 

fen of insensibility, a rotten mire of sensualism, 
a disintegrating chaos of terror, a dazzling trance 
of amazement, a dissolving delirium of delight, a 
swoon of unbalanced excess, or an ecstasy of 
peace based on the fulness of all the faculties 
in exact equivalence. Madness in its wretched 
extreme is an ecstasy of bias ; blessedness in its 
inspired extreme is an ecstasy of equilibrium. 
And what a range of degrees between the contor- 
tions of the lunatic and the repose of the prophet, 
the convulsive leaps of Saint Vitus, antitype of 
the whirling dervish, and the Nirvana-soul of 
Buddha, balancing equivalent of infinitude ! 

THE SECRET FOR DEVELOPING CONSCIOUSNESS. 

But what is the secret of guiding consciousness 
along the path of development to the evolution 
of its highest potentiality ? Attention. We 
must gird up our faculties, and fix them on their 
work, in a voluntary effort of watching the phe- 
nomena that pass before them. We must direct a 
concentrated attention at once upon the matters 



128 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

experienced, and the experiencing powers, if we 
desire to push consciousness to greater fineness 
and greater profundity. Carelessness, fickleness, 
ambiguity, distraction, are our worst foes here. 
Crowds of people feel, but perceive not what they 
feel ; see, but know not what they see. Earnest 
endeavors to clear our observing faculties from 
every indecisive waver or blur, and to secure 
the utmost purity and edge of discrimination, by 
means of analysis, definition, comparison, and 
contrast, will steadily tend to dispel fogs, shed 
light upon obscurities, and bring the hidden 
things of the regions of ignorance and surmise 
to light within our assured grasp. 

But the secret of the education and discipline 
of consciousness is not merely the direction of 
our awakened and energized attention to the 
action of our organs and faculties. We must 
also aim distinctly, by processes voluntarily pros- 
ecuted, to secure the best co-ordination of the 
body and the soul in their parts and in their 
union. 

In each example of exceptional, wholesome 



DEVELOPMENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 1 29 

power, beauty, and harmony of functions, we 
shall find a condition of the organism in which 
the centres and the surfaces are released from 
every hampering tie with each other, and the 
circulations between them are therefore in their 
fullest volume and liberty. This condition is 
equally favorable to excellence of appearance and 
length of endurance. Organic rank and longevity 
are intrinsic correlates. In opposition to this, 
ugliness, plebeian lowness of function, deformity, 
brittleness of state and quickness of decay, are 
found in that condition of the organism where the 
centres constringe the surfaces upon themselves, 
and shrivelled fibres destroy all the open inno- 
cence and ease of flesh and feature, reducing the 
interplay of the organs and the transmission of 
vibrations to their lowest terms. 

An equal development of the vital, mental, 
and moral natures, it is clear, furnishes the best 
state for both richness and length of life, for 
beauty and for staying power. The vice of an 
over-developed vital nature in a man is gluttony ; 
and he perishes of hypertrophy, an excessive 
9 



130 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

tasking and clogging of the burdened circula- 
tions overloaded with adipose. Such a one may 
not be a glutton himself, but the ancestral or 
habitual automatic action in him is, and he 
has to suffer the consequence. The vice of an 
over-developed mental nature is avarice ; and the 
man perishes from atrophy, the excessive effort 
of acquisition shrinking the structures, heating 
and lessening the obstructed and irritated circu- 
lations. The vice of an over-developed moral 
nature is fanaticism ; an ascetic and jealous zeal 
inverting the expenditures into their antitheses, — 
love of good into hate of evil, desire for truth into 
aversion for falsehood, and worship of the beau- 
tiful into execration of the ugly ; and the man 
perishes from the poisoning of the altered circula- 
tions with the acrid ingredients of negation, sus- 
picion, fear, and persecution. The desideratum 
is to have each of the senses — the stomach, the 
liver, the kidneys, the lungs, the brain, the heart, 
every gland, every nervous plexus — free to sus- 
tain its own proper form and rhythm of vibrations, 
while all co-operate in an exact composite con- 



FIRST USE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 1 3 I 

cord, the whole body from scalp to sole capable, 
as if it were one unbroken muscle, of elastic ex- 
pansion and contraction from centre to extremes 
under the lead of the will and the impulse of the 
respiration. 

This result attained in the physical tenement, 
it becomes comparatively easy to establish a 
similar state in the spiritual tenant, extruding all 
sinful and morbid biases of egotism, and flood- 
ing the individual forms with universal contents. 
Then potency, virtue, charm, blessedness, lon- 
gevity, are all seen at their highest values, and 
human experience becomes a conscious realiza- 
tion of the meanings of the divine symbols of 
truth, beauty, and good. 

FIRST REASON FOR EDUCATING CONSCIOUSNESS. 

There are three reasons for trying thus to 
educate our consciousness. The first is that we 
may be warned by it of the earliest and least 
symptoms of danger, and not, through our ob- 
tuseness, allow distortions of form, deteriorations 



132 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

of structure, and disturbances or diminutions of 
functions, to go on, unrecognized, until they are 
remediless. Feeble persons often outlive the 
robust, because their valetudinarian sensitiveness 
detects the slightest signals of ill, and heeds 
what is required ; while the oaken strength of the 
others overlooks the faint summons to beware of 
error, in a complacent hardihood unaware of the 
harms and threats gathering suddenly and fatally 
to smite. So the cultivated aspirant, all alive and 
alert, starts up to grasp a good at the first and 
dimmest indication of its approach or possibility 
of attainment ; while the sluggard sleeps on, un- 
noticing, until it is too late to act with any effect. 
What is a sluggard ? One in whom laziness has 
become organized into a dead instinct, which 
works degradingly in the ignorant darkness of 
its own sloth. In a soul of such unresponsive 
lethargy there may be a wilderness of obscure 
activities and signals going on with all their ap- 
peals and warnings, and the possessor, torpid or 
bewildered, be utterly uncertain of his duty ancl 
his interest. But let definite perception fling its 



SECOND USE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 1 33 

light over the dusky domain, and his work will 
be plain and its motives obvious: The uncertain 
gloom and apathy are changed to precision and 
decision. 



SECOND REASON FOR EDUCATING CONSCIOUSNESS. 

The next motive for a strenuous attempt to 
educate our conscious perceptivity is that we may 
know what to approve, to seek, and to cherish, and 
what to reject, condemn, and avoid, outside of 
ourselves as well as within ourselves. Nothing 
can be more important for us than to be able 
instantly and exactly to discriminate the good 
from the bad, the true from the false, the graceful 
from the awkward, the right from the wrong, the 
ingenuous from the affected, so that we may 
correctly regulate the reactions of our souls upon 
them. It is our noblest duty, nay, it is our 
divinest dignity, freely to order the constituents 
and activities of our consciousness, loyally bring- 
ing them into harmony with the manifested 
attributes and laws of God. This can only be 



134 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

done by eliciting in all the latent capacities and 
outlooks of our being the highest degrees of 
objective cognition and subjective recognition. 
Man must develop his consciousness in order 
that he may become free, obeying nothing 
except that which he ought to obey. He who 
submits to a base appetite or passion, against his 
reason or conscience, is a slave ; while he who 
resists and overcomes it, because that is his duty, 
is a freeman. The greatest help to this liberty 
is an accurate discrimination of the ranks of 
motives. 



THIRD REASON FOR EDUCATING CONSCIOUSNESS. 

Another reason for developing the personal 
consciousness of each one to its utmost capacity 
is that this is a necessary condition for the ex- 
tension of our faculties and functions to take 
possession of the finest and the grandest experi- 
ences possible to human nature. The conscious 
voluntary side of our activities remaining blunt, 
loose, obscure, weak, incoherent, we must leave 



THIRD USE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 1 35 

vast ranges of the most delicate and sublime in- 
telligence and emotion wholly beyond our grasp, 
and even unsuspected by our imagination. The 
stupidest and vulgarest of fallacies is to suppose 
that things are the same to all, that the experi- 
ences of men amount to about the same result. 
Nothing is the same to any two persons. Every 
experience is to be valued by its own worth, plus 
the worth of the consciousness into which it 
comes. The same experience when stirring the 
activities of a soul which is a drop, and when 
stirring those of a soul which is an ocean, would 
have an almost infinitely different value in the 
two cases. An electric shock is not measured 
by the jar which emits it, but by the mass of the 
conditions on which it takes effect. What is the 
aesthetic value of a landscape when inspected 
by the eye of a vulture as compared with its 
value when contemplated by the eye of an artist ? 
The divinest specimens of our race, unfolding and 
utilizing their nature with a faithful persever- 
ance engrafted on their free gifts, come at last 
to experience a luminousness and precision of 



I36 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

thought, a grandeur and vividness of imagination, 
a massive richness and intensity of emotion, 
transcending the wildest dreams of the ground- 
lings of humanity. One thrill of the soul of 
Shakspeare outvalues the gathered experience 
of a whole race of Calibans. The smallest spark 
may fire the vastest magazine, while the hugest 
flash must prove a weak affair if it meets but a 
grain of powder. So the value of any experience 
is to be estimated by adding to it the sum of the 
faculties and accomplishments of him who ex- 
periences it. There can be no stronger motive, 
there need be no other, for cultivating the con- 
sciousness to its most illuminated extension and 
energy. 

MOTIVES IN THE SCHOOL. 

The next department of our subject is, the 
motives which the schoolmasters of man use to 
stimulate him to his tasks. Our native care- 
lessness is such, our indolence is so deep-seated, 
we are beset by so many distractions, the mis- 
leading examples around us are so numerous 



MOTIVES IN THE SCHOOL. 1 37 

and seductive, the temptations to yield to super- 
ficial and perilous pleasures are so keen and so 
constant, we have to encounter so many subtle 
persuasions to self-deceit and evasion of the 
stern behests of duty, that we need carefully to 
cherish our sensibility to all the incentives of 
aspiration and resolve. The commonest and 
deadliest foe to excellence is the habit of dull 
conformity to the average life around us, sinking 
contentedly into a set of mechanical usages or a 
torpid routine. To prevent this there must be 
kept alive a fresh perception and feeling of those 
great moral considerations which quicken and 
instigate the energies of man to an untiring 
pursuit of their appropriate goals. 

If every one were in a wholesome condition, free 
from foul delusions within and base allurements 
without, then a distinct apprehension of virtues 
and ends — the true things to be sought accord- 
ing to the general agreement of mankind — 
would be enough to keep his loyalty earnest. 
The simple contemplation of a good end would 
of itself generate the desire and will to attain it. 



138 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

But unfortunately such is not the case with 
most of us. We are both fettered by slothful 
errors and assailed by furious passions from 
within, and also enticed by manifold fallacies 
and blandishments from without. J\nd so the 
necessity arises not only for us to see clearly 
what the true ends in life are, but likewise con- 
tinually to make the most vivid application we 
can to our conscience and affection of the stimu- 
lating inducements to fidelity in the pursuit of 
these ends. 

And the one primary thing in our power to do 
in this respect is to cultivate our own moral sen- 
sibility, so that it can, with the utmost quickness 
and accuracy, discriminate and respond to the 
different grades of moral stimulus. The fineness 
and extent of the motives which suffice to ani- 
mate a man determine his moral rank. How 
wide is your mental horizon, and how definitely 
does your sympathy include its details ? is the 
question which distributes the souls of men in 
their places on the scale of greatness and worih. 
And is it not obvious how much is left here for 



MOTIVES IN THE SCHOOL. 139 

every one of us to do or to neglect ? It is 
forever within his own soul that the first work 
is to be done by each person. In vain shall we 
seek outwardly for the place where inspiration 
falls from heaven. Wisdom and duty are to 
cultivate the conditions of inspiration within us, 
wherever we are. To him whose heart and 
brain furnish a suitable conductor no spot of 
space is without the tripod, but every atom is 
drenched and sultry with power. 

Just so long as the intrinsic attraction exerted 
upon our hearts by the ends of life is insuffi- 
cient to make the labor for them a spontaneous 
tribute, we must still recall to attention the 
motives which are their sanctions and spurs, and 
nurse their influence on the will, not forgetting 
meanwhile that something diviner even than 
duty is seen when the bond of obligation is 
transmuted into the garland of liberty. Man is 
then most worthy in the sight of God when 
from love through wisdom he spontaneously 
fulfils uses unconstrained by any foreign mo- 
tive. 



I40 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 



DESIRE TO IMPROVE : ASPIRATION. 

We are usually, however, in a state less free 
and harmonious than that just described, a state 
needing additional incitements. These are not 
left unsupplied. But the educators of the human 
pupil, with their adjuncts, the tutoring influences 
of nature, properly make their first appeal to his 
innate love of improvement in knowledge, pleas- 
ure, and concord, his inherent desire for spiritual 
power, joy, and peace. The soul was made on 
purpose to learn to possess itself in conscious- 
ness of truth and good, and it finds a pure bliss 
in fulfilling this destiny. Even the most de- 
graded pupil, amidst his ignorance and dirt, 
instinctively loves knowledge and purity, and 
yearns to rise into their atmosphere. That 
sensitive plant, the human soul, however long 
shut in darkness, leans towards the first ray of 
light which struggles through the lattices of 
its sensual dungeon. As the marvellous young 
Novalis said, " Philosophy is homesickness, a de- 



DESIRE TO IMPROVE. 141 

sire to be at home everywhere in the universe." 
Man wishes to be on familiar terms with every 
thing around him. He longs to have in his 
mind a system of reasoned truths corresponding 
with the divine body of truths amidst which he 
is placed. There is a foreordained agreement 
between the uses of all natural laws and the 
faculties of the human mind, the beauties of the 
creation and the sensibilities of the observer. 
And by this original fact, by the pure desire and 
joy of making progressive attainments, the pupil 
is allured to his education, — allured with a force 
proportioned to his spiritual rank. True fulfil- 
ment everywhere is pure happiness. All the suf- 
ferings of man are either the base alloys mixed 
with the clear metal of his experience, or the 
purging fires made necessary by his errors and 
failures. The study and practice of wisdom and 
love in their uses are the perpetual chewing of 
a honey which never cloys ; and, compared with 
a hut in which dwells a man devoted to this art, 
the palace of Sardanapalus is a sty. 



142 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 



DESIRE TO SURPASS OTHERS * AMBITION. 

The second force which our teachers put in 
play to keep us zealously at our studies is ambi- 
tion. The most gifted and lofty students find 
incentive enough in the intrinsic claims and 
charms of excellence, and are rather called to 
guard against over-excitement than tempted to 
complain of dulness. But a great many, if left 
to this motive alone, would find it but deadish, 
and would sleep and stagnate. There is, there- 
fore, in human nature — and it is fortunate there 
is — a strong propensity to set up standards in 
the sight of spectators, and endeavor to reach 
them : to enter the lists with rivals, and fight for 
victory. Nature subsidizes this stimulant for 
high ends ; sometimes, unhappily, for low ends. 

There is a noble emulation, each one striving 
to see who can do the best ; and there is a mean 
competition, each one plotting to defeat his peers. 
The hateful existence of this jealous form of ambi- 
tion has led many teachers to condemn the em- 



DESIRE TO SURPASS OTHERS. 1 43 

ployment of any overt prizes or invidious distinc- 
tions as incitements to greater exertion ; and we 
must confess our sympathy goes very far with 
them. But a good thing is not to be wholly re- 
jected because a bad thing now and then steals 
in after it. The use is to be kept, while careful 
measures are taken to avert the abuse. The 
higher motives should receive the greater promi- 
nence, but it does not yet seem expedient to ex- 
clude the lower ones. A bar of steel, hung in the 
magnetic meridian, and struck, is magnetized ; 
that is, the vibrations received cause a molecular 
rearrangement, and the metal acquires new and 
nobler qualities. So there is something very 
beautiful, expressive of a divine law, when an 
idle and reckless boy, placed in a class of studious 
and aspiring ones, is suddenly struck by emu- 
lation, magnetized with a higher motive, and 
begins to work in a resolute and generous style 
foreign to him before. No, this force is not 
always an unworthy one. 

See how it is in the great school of God. What 
innumerable rewards of merit, with nicely gradu- 



144 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

ated degrees, are there prepared and distributed ! 
Now one is promoted to the head of his class ; 
now one receives a medal. What applauses, 
resounding across seas and echoing to far ages> 
are for those who acquit themselves brilliantly 
on the exhibition-days of the world ! To take 
this mighty impulse all away, at present, would 
surely be pernicious, if not fatal. 

And yet it must be admitted that this motive 
is too frequently used and too strongly pressed. 
Society suffers in all its avenues from the fierce 
contests of men with one another for superiority. 
The struggle entails a ruinous extravagance of 
exertion, as well as excites to a feverish exaspera- 
tion selfish passions previously but too intense. 
This high-strung contention is adapted to lessen 
or exclude the action of purer and nobler motives 
far more wholesome alike for the private indi- 
vidual and the general public. The true com- 
petitor for man to take is himself, — ever calmly 
and heroically working to make his present sur- 
pass his past, and his future transcend his pres- 
ent. That is to say, the most auspicious, the 



' FEAR OF PUNISHMENT. 145 

truly divine, contest of man is that in which he 
makes his actual self the rival of his ideal self, 
and illustrates with a series of realizing victories 
the models strewn along the ascending heights of 
his career. The supreme aim of the educator — 
whether the educator of himself or the educator 
of others — should be to need less and less the 
goading stimulus of those historic motives of self- 
love, pride, emulation, and vanity, which transmit 
the virus of ancient antagonisms, and to use more 
and more the calming inspiration of those pro- 
phetic motives of duty, disinterestedness, sym- 
pathy, and universal harmony, whose promises 
guide the way of humanity, and already throw 
their illumination on a redeemed future. 



FEAR OF PUNISHMENT : DISGRACE. 

The teachers in the school of life have also a 
powerful hold upon many of their pupils in the 
sense of shame and the fear of punishment. In 
the book of public observation and memory, black 
marks are made for the faults of offenders. The 
10 



I46 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

ignoramus, the shirk, the plagiarist — bung- 
ling, boosted by prompting, or stupidly silent — 
are degraded to the foot, and must suffer mor- 
tification, especially on examination-days and 
when it comes time to review. Strict rules have 
to be enforced, even if severe measures are 
necessary, upon the dunces, the rogues, the 
truants, and the rebels of the school. Otherwise 
the utter subversion of discipline and nullification 
of good results would ensue. The imprisonment 
of formidable criminals is their suspension, the 
execution of desperate characters is their ex- 
pulsion, from the school of life. And while it 
is true that self-esteem, anger, and mortification 
are adulterated motives, we must not overlook 
the fact that they are powerful ones, and often 
quite indispensable. Their usefulness is extreme, 
although on a vulgar plane. Give pride and 
shame sufficient strength, and they will make the 
jail and the gibbet needless. 

The complex machinery of legal and ceremo- 
nial penalty and reward is the venerable device 
for keeping order while the world's pupils are 



FEAR OF PUNISHMENT. 1 47 

studying their lessons. But the model scholar 
is one who is always exemplary, not from fear 
of punishment, but from spontaneous inclina- 
tion; who, mild and prompt in manners, heeds 
his teachers with reverence ; who is impelled 
•not by vanity, but by love of study ; and who 
thinks more of acquisition than of recitation, 
more of progress than of promotion. 

Still it is a fact not to be forgotten that in- 
evitable retributions are awarded according to 
deserts. The Brahmanic devotee, refusing to 
move, is paralyzed and stiffened into a helpless 
stump ; so the miserable mental sluggard slowly 
perishes from atrophy of thought, a marasmus 
or wasting away of the unnourished soul. The 
critic who examines every thing, not to assimilate 
it and profit by it, but to find fault with it and 
reject it, is the victim of a spiritual dyspepsia. 
We read in Greek mythology that the hapless 
Orion, patiently turning his blank eyeballs 
towards the sun, at length received his sight. 
So the blind soul, holding itself to the truth 
with noble desire, obtains the power of vision 



148 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

as its reward. Culture, accordingly as it is 
good or bad, is in itself both pay and penalty. 
For a symmetrical or a deformed education will 
mould the faculties and train the habits of its 
subjects to fair or to hideous results. Just as 
in those English forests of oaks, grown for ship- 
timber, some are helped to shoot up tall and 
straight, but others are artificially guided into 
twisted shapes of knots, knees, curves, and 
angles, which the vegetation of simple nature 
never knew. 



THE LAW OF EXPRESSION AS A MOTIVE. 

Perhaps the most central and powerful, cer- 
tainly one of the most intrinsic and inexhausti- 
ble, of stimulants to the pursuit of excellence in 
character and in accomplishments is that which 
arises from a clear appreciation of the moral 
ranks and values of different men and -of their 
experiences, as revealed through the law of ex- 
pression. He who estimates his fellows coarsely 
by their degrees of outward success alone, and 



LAW OF EXPRESSION AS A MOTIVE. 1 49 

sees no marked distinction between the genius 
and the charlatan, the coward and the hero, 
the sluggard and the aspirant, the cynic and the 
humanitarian, the voluptuary and the saint, the 
artist and the bungler, the sage and the dolt, 
may be excitable only to vulgar ends by vulgar 
motives, and may doze in stupid contentment 
while the clarions of the cherubim are sounding 
and God himself is displaying his divinest prizes. 
But let one have a keen discrimination of the 
various orders of character, with a loathing for 
the base and a reverence for the noble, and as 
each example in turn passes before his inspec- 
tion, the appropriate grades of moral passion 
are kindled in his soul, and he is armed with 
aversion for the evil and reanimated with love 
for the good. 

This is a result equally desirable for the indi- 
vidual and for the community : because such a 
man cannot remain inert and unprogressive in 
himself; nor can he be deceived by the claimants 
for public honor and advancement who solicit 
his approval. He will well understand how to 



150 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

distinguish the little, fidgety natures, afflicted 
with an itch for notoriety, restlessly planning to 
secure prominence and to palm themselves off 
on the people as leaders and idols, from the 
great calm spirits who slowly grow in weight 
and worth by a solitary waiting on God, a sacred 
devotion to truth and good ; and who are ever 
more earnest to acquire private merit than to 
gain a public recognition of it, however strongly 
they may desire the latter also. If such an edu- 
cation in discriminative insight were general, the 
superficial and unprincipled self-seekers, now so 
commonly hoisted into conspicuous stations, 
would remain in the obscurity and neglect be- 
fitting them, and a very different class of men 
would be called to the posts of leadership. 

The expression of the votary of ambition and 
vanity compared with that of the votary of worth 
and improvement, makes it easy for any one who 
understands the manifestations of character in- 
stantly to tell them apart. The one desires the 
appearances and the material advantages of 
merit ; the other seeks the reality of it, with 



LAW OF EXPRESSION AS A MOTIVE. 151 

its spiritual fruitions. The one is uneasily en- 
gaged in plots to make himself prominent before 
the public eye, that he may show off and gain 
the admiration and envy of men ; the other is 
busy in private labors to purify and harmonize 
his faculties and perfect his attainments. If this 
latter one too seeks opportunities of appearing 
on public occasions, it is neither for ostentation 
nor for selfish advancement, but to fulfil his uses. 
And if he cannot get such opportunities without 
servile attentions to petty or corrupt persons, he 
quietly foregoes them, and retires into the un- 
noticed routine of private duty, satisfied with his 
own respect and the all-weighing approbation of 
God. 

Such a man as Daniel Webster would covet 
the presidency of the United States, because he 
knew he was pre-eminently fitted to fill the sta- 
tion with dignity and honor, with credit to him- 
self and glory to the country. But numerous 
men, celebrated solely as political managers, 
caucus-dictators, have impudently sought to foist 
themselves into that great office — as all ac- 



152 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

quainted with their real characters are well 
aware — for merely selfish ends, from personal 
ambition. Such men, so far from being ad- 
mired for their brilliancy and prowess, their 
"scathing invectives and brilliant outbursts," 
should be nauseated. Instead of being enabled to 
travel over the land amidst showy ovations, care- 
fully prepared by themselves and their conspira- 
tors, they should be retired from public life, as 
the most insidious enemies of the people and the 
worst danger of the country. 

The demagogue may always be known by the 
ignoble passions he makes use of, the low motives 
he appeals to, his quarrelsome egotism, the parti- 
san and personal character of his ends, the bitter 
dissensions he breeds, his habit of withdrawing 
public attention from generous aims and benefi- 
cent measures and fixing it upon mean and irri- 
tating things. For their own protection from 
misleaders, the citizens of a country where the 
ballot rules should learn to interpret the signs of 
character. For when the ideals of a people are 
just their government will be pure. They will 



LAW OF EXPRESSION AS A MOTIVE. 1 53 

see that a statesman should be a pilot, but that a 
politician is a barnacle. Statesmanship is the 
art of changing a faulty nation from what it is 
into what it ought to be. Politics is too often 
but the set of tricks by which scrambling man- 
agers secure their own elevation and emolument. 
Ambition excites the conspiracy of the few, 
while patriotism would inspire the co-working of 
all. Mastery of the law of expression will enable 
him who loves his country to detect the char- 
latan and the plotter under all their disguises, 
and so preserve his unprostituted vote for those 
really worthiest to teach and guide the people. 

But that law has a still more intimate personal 
application to us all. It is the key to self- 
direction as well as to the estimates we should 
form of others. 

The secrets of our being and the ultimates of 
our destiny are, in the case of every one of us, 
concentrated and published in the expression of 
our form and its bearing. When the face is un- 
covered, and the voice in exercise, what open or 
hidden truth of his personality and experience 



154 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

can a man hold back from betrayal to the com- 
petent beholder and listener ? Not one. In the 
proportions and play of his features, in every 
limb, in every look, in every motion, the deepest 
mysteries of his disposition and life leak out, flash 
forth, or obscurely hint in pregnant symbols at 
what they are. No mortal can escape either the 
facts of his individuality or the law of their 
manifestation. The angles and curves of his 
movement, the sway of his centre of gravity, the 
inflections of his speech, the depth of his eye, a 
hundred nameless signals intuitively grasped, re- 
veal the measure of his soul, the grade of his ex- 
perience, the quality of his conscience, his mystic 
poise and openness of sensibility or his sandy 
dryness, and make him wondrously attractive 
or shallowly neutral or painfully repulsive, — 
according to the scale of nature and the domin- 
ancy of habit indicated. And he cannot help it ; 
because being is fate and expression is its signal. 
The skin of every one is the livery of the god 
he serves. Look first at the roseate bloom, 
peach tint, pearly purity, and satin texture of the 



LAW OF EXPRESSION AS A MOTIVE. 155 

cheek of youthful health and innocence, then at 
the washed-leathern or tripe-like face of a hag- 
gard old roue ; and what more penetrative moral 
lesson can be applied to a soul of undefiled 
sensibility ? 

The eyes are the amulets of the mind. 
Through one pair shine angelic messages sig- 
nifying all that goes on in the seventh heaven ; 
while another pair mean no more than a couple 
of beads ; and another still, bloodshot and stained 
with all foulness, seem surcharged with the vices 
and crimes of Tophet. Who that has the least 
perception of the ranks of things, of the com- 
parative worths of experiences, but would be de- 
lighted to own the first as his, pained or horrified 
at the others ? 

The nose is the index of the soul and the rudder 
of the body. And how it varies in its grades of 
moral revelation, from the royal and divine symbol 
of immortal liberty, pride, power, worship, and re- 
pose, in the Apollo, to the monstrous fungus, or 
the shapeless bulb of warty purple, sometimes 
shamelessly protruded on the face of a glutton- 



156 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

ous wine-bibber. And these various expressions 
not only betray the secrets, ancestral or individ- 
ual, of their subject ; they likewise rain retribu- 
tion on him in the instinctive emotions they 
conjure up in their beholders. 

The voice is the organ of the character. Our 
chronic states of body and dominant modes of 
affection fix the qualities of our vocal utterance, 
which ranges from squeak, grunt, and splutter, to 
flute, harp, and trumpet, and produces in the 
hearer estimates antl feelings towards us in pre- 
cise accordance with what it is supposed to show 
we are, through what it seems to symbolize. 
What an intense motive is here brought to bear 
on every one who cares for the judgments of his 
fellows, to become all that he ought to be, so 
that his expression will produce in others the 
emotions he would wish them to entertain 
towards him ! For the only sure way to seem 
attractive is by being worthy. 

There is a man whose supercilious forehead 
and insolent breast look as if they were aston- 
ished and indignant that all persons do not kneel 



LAW' OF EXPRESSION AS A MOTIVE. 1 57 

in worship as they come in sight ; and his arro- 
gant demeanor makes every one resent him with 
anger, with disgust, or with pity, according to 
the disposition of the observer. Who would be 
willing unwittingly to evoke and draw on him- 
self such an instinctive reaction ? 

A certain man, after an avaricious and cruel 
career full of wrong success, died, leaving a vast 
fortune which his skinflint soul had kept him 
from using and forced him merely to hoard. An 
artist competent to do .it, if asked to epitomize 
his history and symbolize his life, would draw a 
gaunt leg and foot running away, and a bony 
hand convulsively clutching a bag of money 
surmounted by a flint with a skin tightly drawn 
over it. Who that can read meanings would not 
rather live and die very poor, than be doomed to 
carry such an expression and leave such a moral ? 
But in overwhelming contrast with this dire 
specimen, there is a man who at seventy-five 
is as young and fresh in heart as ever, ingenuous, 
modest and affectionate as a maiden, heroic and 
chivalrous as a knight, master of the mighty 



158 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

treasures of history, science, poetry, and philos- 
ophy, blessed devotee of truth, beauty, and good, 
flaming with generous indignation at injustice 
and tyranny, loving all humanity as he loves 
himself, quick to answer every call of suffering, 
rapt in worshipful contemplation of God, ab- 
solutely fearless of death in his solid assurance 
of immortality. The expressive symbol for this 
character would be an outstretched, open hand, 
full of gifts, and an altar with a burning heart on 
it, from which a diffusive incense ascends into 
the over-arching infinitude. Can any intelligent 
and sensitive observer look on this contrast and 
not be filled with a beautiful desire and nerved 
with a sacred resolution ? 

There comes down the front steps of her 
glittering mansion a woman of great wealth and 
aristocratic family, beflounced, bejewelled, and 
befurred, with a hundred thousand dollars value 
in toggery on her person. She laboriously 
climbs, with obsequious aid, into her carriage 
with its uniformed flunkeys, and rolls along the 
avenue, looking down with lazy disdain on the 



LAW OF EXPRESSION AS A MOTIVE. 1 59 

plebeian passers, her nose seeming incessantly 
to sniff the perfume of her own pride, and to 
seek with angry disappointment the scent of 
homage from others. Her luxury and sloth have 
deformed her out of all symmetry into a fearful 
ugliness, and her arrogant temper has depraved 
the features of her visage into the mingled ex- 
pression of a pride whose complacence no gazer 
can stomach, and of an exaction whose merciless 
stoniness is frightful. She weighs two hundred 
and eighty pounds. Her eyes and ears are sunk 
half out of sight, while her lips and cheeks, of the 
color of pounded beefsteak, are hanging collops. 
Yet this awful mass of fat and blood without, 
conceit and scorn and burdensome uselessness 
within, thinks herself an object of interest, and 
superior to most of her fellow-beings, because 
she is rich in money and of high lineage in the 
fashionable world ! What a terrible plunge her 
self-esteem would make if she could understand 
the figure she cuts in the sight of all who can 
read and estimate interiors and exteriors by the 
intrinsic standards of excellence ! What a differ- 



l6o THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

ent picture, and what an opposite result, had this 
woman been a gentle and devout lady, so wisely 
faithful to every law of duty and grace as to 
secure for herself at once transcendent goodness 
of character and exquisite beauty of person, not 
proud of her fortune, but consecrating it as a 
means of greater usefulness, a model of fidelity 
in every domestic and social relation, surrounded 
by loving friends, followed by worshipful in- 
feriors ! We all perforce express what we are, 
and are treated, secretly if not publicly, in ac- 
cordance. 

At the same time, in the same city with the 
foregoing example of half-dehumanized mon- 
strosity, lives a poor shop-girl, whose wages barely 
supply herself and her aged mother with the 
necessities of existence. At nightfall she hurries 
to the single upper chamber which is their home. 
A canary sings welcome, and there are a few 
simple prints on the walls, and some flowers 
growing in the windows. As the mother and 
child embrace each other, with a kiss, their faces 
are filled with a divine light of love. In spite of 



LAW OF EXPRESSION AS A MOTIVE. l6l 

poverty and toil the maiden has health and 
strength, and a heart as full of trust and joy as 
it is of innocence and affection. She seems ever 
encompassed by invisible angels, because she 
is herself a visible angel of goodness, beauty, 
and grace. She carols at her tasks about the 
chamber as lightly as a bird, and is as happy as 
the spirits of guiltlessness and unselfish service 
can render their spotless habitation. No unper- 
verted spectator can behold her, and take the 
impression of her exquisite charm of soul and 
form and feature, without a reverential tribute of 
admiration and love. An ineffable harmony and 
blessedness float about her wherever she moves, 
enveloping her as a spiritual atmosphere whose 
fragrant loveliness every friend senses with a 
mystic delight. Is there any motive stronger 
than the one thus conveyed should be to inspire 
the wish and purpose l;o be good and pure, guile- 
less, modest, loyal to duty, an open medium of 
the divine spirit ? What we are, breathes 
through us at every pore. What we do, moulds 
the interiors and leaves its trace on the exteriors, 
ii 



1 62 % THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

Destiny reveals us in our expression, assigns us 
our rank, shows to every interpreter how pre- 
cious we are, or how worthless, and makes us 
correspondently charming or odious. 

To know this law, and to practise the art of 
reading its lessons in others and in ourselves, is 
the most stimulative of all the forms of moral 
education. And when we see one making the 
most debased and horrid manifestations of its 
secrets, in utter ignorance of it himself, the 
application of its teachings becomes more pun- 
gent and awful than ever. The writer, in illus- 
tration, vividly remembers an example from 
many years ago. The keeper of a stall in a 
metropolitan market for the sale of pork had 
amassed a large fortune, and was much puffed 
up by the consequence it gave him in his own 
eyes and in the eyes of his vulgar peers. He 
knew not that he was unspeakably coarse, mean, 
ungainly, stupid, and devoid of interest. Asked 
one day to contribute a small sum in charity, 
he refused with offensive bluntness. Instantly, 
before the refined vision of his applicant, the 



LAW OF EXPRESSION AS A MOTIVE. 1 63 

huge boor was unveiled in symbolic revelation. 
The visitor saw the butcher stripped, scraped, 
hung by a gambrel through his ankle on a hook 
in the stall, while one of the dead animals was 
taken down, placed upright on his hind feet, and 
apparelled in a pair of trousers, a necktie, and a 
linen collar ; and it was then quite impossible 
to tell which was the man and which was the 
hog. 

And, before spiritually minded observers, this 
dreadful blazonry of the interiors is continuously 
going on, all over the world, wherever men meet 
and part. What a motive to make us shrink 
from the evil, yearn to the good ! What a 
tremendous exposure of the portents of human 
doom, in the constant day of judgment ! 

A young man, whose portrait had just been 
painted, when it came home sat down to a care- 
ful study of it, to see if he could detect what it 
revealed. He recognized in it something which 
greatly dissatisfied him. He destroyed the por- 
trait, saying to himself, " If that is the way I 
look, I must at once begin to cultivate traits and 



1 64 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

lead a life which will develop a better expres- 
sion, an expression which will show me to be 
worthy of the respect and affection of those I 
shall meet in the various paths of the world." 
There spoke the voice of a noble aspiration 
sustained by a profound insight, and setting an 
example pre-eminently worthy to be followed by 
every one who would make his real become 
plastic under the remoulding influence of a 
diviner ideal. 

TWO CLASSES OF MOTIVES. 

Thus we see that there are two classes of 
motives for stimulating pupils to the discharge 
of their duty. First, the positive motives, 
hopes of the rewards of fidelity and success ; 
desires for the substantial goods of experience. 
These appeal most strongly to high and gen- 
erous natures. Secondly, the negative motives, 
fears of disagreeable punishments of sin and 
failure ; aversions from the retributive evils of 
experience. These appeal most strongly to low 
and mean natures. 



THE SCALE OF MORAL RANKS. l6$ 

The skill to see' which kind of motive will 
work best in a given instance is a desideratum 
in a teacher : for there are pupils on whom the 
silken thread of honor has a more powerful hold 
than the hempen cable of infamy ; and there are 
others whom a shock of alarm will impel much 
farther than any attraction of reverence can. 

THE SCALE OF MORAL RANKS. 

There is a moral scale which marks the ranks 
of motives. The top of the scale is the disinter- 
ested love of right, whose standard is the will 
of God, the universal order and fitness of things, 
what is in itself absolutely the best and most 
becoming, — these three formulas being but dif- 
ferent modes of stating the same thing, — though 
no little discernment is required to know which 
form of expression will, in each case, be most 
intelligible and effective. The bottom of the 
scale is the base dread of bodily pain. Between 
these two extremes, of pure loyalty to truth and 
good, and of mean shrinking from physical chas- 



1 66 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

tisement, there are many grades, the relative 
height of each one of which is determined by 
the degree of its limitation to mere self, or of its 
extension to include unselfish ends, — the happi- 
ness or unhappiness of relatives and friends, the 
approval or disapproval of neighbors, the benefit 
or injury of the community and the world, the 
order or disorder of the universe, the smile or 
frown of God. The moral worth of the motive 
brightens and rises with each expansion of the 
good regarded ; darkens and sinks with each 
contraction of that good. And what a gamut 
it is which man spans between the free sacrifice 
of his life in rapturous martyrdom for humanity, 
and the reckless subordination of every higher 
good to the appetite for a quid of tobacco or 
an intoxicating quaff! 

Now, the noblest pupil is he who is most 
capable of being ruled exclusively by means of 
the highest motive ; and the basest pupil is he 
who is least able to be ruled by any but the 
lowest motive. The aim of every teacher, with 
reference to the motives he applies, should be to 



% THE SCALE OF MORAL RANKS. 1 67 

begin at the, top of the scale, and descend as 
little and as rarely as possible and yet keep 
order and secure his ends. The character and 
rank of any teacher, as a disciplinarian, may be 
accurately graded by the constancy with which 
he is able to stay at the summit of the scale, or 
the frequency with which he is forced to stoop 
to the foot of it. Every high-toned teacher, in 
literal schools, or in the great untechnical school 
of life, will wish to rise in his appeals, along 
the ascending personal affections, to where con- 
science is a pure echo of the divine law; and 
will dislike to sink along the narrow shames and 
hates, down to where the flesh winces under 
the rod. 

Education should counteract, not foster, self- 
ishness. Glory may be used as a spur; it should 
never be made an aim. Aspiring to acquire 
and impart disinterestedness, the motives ought 
always to be congruous with the business. Who 
would light a torch to exhibit a star ? 

No other motives wear like the disinterested 
ones. Ambition, disappointed, is apt to turn 



1 68 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

into misanthropy. And it often grows torpid 
when fed on applause ; there is danger of too 
many poppies creeping among its laurels. But 
its edge can never become dull when whetted 
by the constant sight of superior perfection. 

No other man is characterized by such dignity 
and calmness as he who is consecrated to the 
divinest ends and possessed by the loftiest mo- 
tives. Vulgarity and fear mark those who are 
subservient to the temporary means and artifices 
of society, while a noble serenity distinguishes 
him whose chief attention is given to the eternal 
aims and authorities of life. Our agitation and 
precariousness are proportioned to the lowness, 
our weight and poise to* the altitude, of our 
ends and motives. A shock may shatter the 
ship, but no storm can stir the star. 

RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 

There are a few practical rules by which the 
pupil, grappling with the life-studies assigned to 
him in this world, will do well to be guided. 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 169 

These rules are drawn from the experience of 
sage teachers, and embody the best advice their 
philosophy can furnish for the young disciples 
who look to them for direction. 

I. The first rule is, Have a definite object, and 
keep it distinctly in view. Do not live at random. 
Purpose is the very life of our life, without which 
a man might as well not be a man. Miscellane- 
ous studies not integrated by some comprehen- 
sive design, rambling desires and incoherent 
efforts, tend to scattered and vague results 
swiftly evaporating. An aimless man will always 
be a nameless man. 

A chronic purpose, firmly held in sight, year 
after year, is like an intellectual trade-wind blow- 
ing through the life, magnetizing the mind, and 
attracting all the appropriate materials that pass. 
Definiteness of aim also brings every thing to a 
head, concentrates and organizes into available 
shape things otherwise lawlessly distributed, 
useless, and soon lost. Toils and acquisitions 
which, with unsettled intentions, flatten into a 
desert, with consistent designs, loom into a 



170 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

mountain. A ruling purpose is thus necessary 
to make repetitions accumulation, and to com- 
bine fractional experiences into an integral life. 

II. Make no skips. As far as you go, master 
every step thoroughly. To the childish mind it 
sometimes seems a shrewd achievement to omit 
a dull page, evade a puzzling impediment, leap 
over a difficult task or chapter, and go on to the 
next. Even adult pupils, in the gravest affairs 
of life, are not unfrequently guilty of the same 
folly. But it saves a little exertion in the pres- 
ent, only to impose far severer efforts in the fu- 
ture. It spares a little patience now, but by and 
by will exact the remitted sum with compound 
interest at a hundred per cent. Every such 
omission costs a thousand times more than it 
saves : for succeeding processes depend on pre- 
ceding ; and, sooner or later, exigencies will arise 
out of which there is no extrication but by going 
back, and doing, at a greatly heightened expense, 
the work which the callow toilsman thought he 
was so acute in eluding. 

Life in all its great enterprises and aspirations, 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 171 

from first to last, is like a chain : no matter how 
excellently made and welded the chain, no 
matter how well fastened at one extremity to 
a precious load, no matter what immense draw- 
ing power clasps it at the other extremity, — if, 
at any intermediate point, a single link be un- 
hasped or wanting, the load cannot be moved, 
all the elaborate apparatus is useless. 

Buckle down, therefore, resolutely to every 
problem in turn as you reach it, and never give 
it up unvanquished. Every such conquest sharp- 
ens the wits, confirms the courage, makes the 
soul athletic and self-reliant, and engenders a 
growing force to win new victories. 

III. Beware of errors. Mistakes are worse 
than ignorance, as a clear soil is better than a 
soil infested with weeds. One erroneous datum 
in a sum, and it is incapable of solution. One un- 
sound principle ingrained in a character, or one 
mischievous postulate laid at the basis of a course 
of life, and it may be almost impossible to har- 
monize that character, or successfully adjust that 
life to the standard of wisdom and virtue. A 



172 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

compact and imposing fabric of argument, built 
up with great pains, may be utterly demolished 
by the detection of a false premise at the be- 
ginning, or an unlucky non-sequititr in the 
middle. In the concatenated succession of in- 
ferences and events, motives and deeds, a single 
blunder or sophism may transmit its effect along 
the whole construction, vitiating all, and produc- 
ing at last the most destructive consequences. 
There is no telling how or when a mistake will 
terminate. It is the worst thing in the universe, 
except a sin, and is half-brother to that. 

It is necessary, when seeking to avoid errors, 
to be as circumspect in rejecting as in accepting ; 
because a negation is often the most positive of 
affirmations. For example, to refuse to do a 
virtuous deed obligatory on you is to do a vicious 
deed. And then the observer must never forget 
that in this world scarcely any thing is altogether 
as it seems. It is by no means the glibbest 
tongue that proves the wisest head, nor the 
smoothest face that indicates the frankest heart. 
Mistakes beset the inquirer at every avenue, and 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 1 73 

all the earth is full of deceits. The moon sheds a 
broad sheet of silver over the whole lake ; but, 
from where you stand, only a single, shimmering 
bar of radiance is visible. We must, therefore, 
keep every faculty vigilant to prevent errors. 
And in this task a wise teacher will try to 
make his pupils see that a habit of mental and 
verbal exactitude is invaluable. Precise defini- 
tions, in the search for truth, may be likened to 
lamps ; but, when confused or obscure, these 
very lamps become additional stumbling-blocks. 
Look sharply after the meanings of terms, and 
see that they are used with combined perspicuity 
and uniformity. 

IV. Another rule to be laid down for the ob- 
servance of every earnest student in the school 
of life — a rule much too little heeded by most 
persons — is this : If you feel a particular dis- 
like for any given branch of culture, yet know 
it to possess intrinsic worth, then take special 
pains to cultivate that precise province. It is 
your weak points that most need reinforcement. 
Your strong points are comparatively able to 



174 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

take care of themselves. Of course no one 
would assert the paradox that a man should 
choose for his vocation that department of labor 
for which he has least affinity, — he who has no 
ear for music becoming a musician, he who has 
no eye for forms and colors becoming a painter. 
But educative art should aim to remedy natural 
defect. If a person discovers in himself exu- 
berance of imagination, enthusiastic sensibility, 
copiousness of language, then let him, however 
distasteful it be at first, study mathematics and 
the natural sciences, in order that systematic 
knowledge of facts and laws may balance the 
fervors of his genius, and ballast his fancy with 
solid materials. On the other hand, a man of 
dry mind, of sterile feeling, should strive to 
counteract his excessive literality and plodding 
hardness of soul by paying assiduous court to 
all the softening charms and inspiring influences 
of music, painting, poetry, and whatever else 
tends to melt or fire the heart. Revere your 
aptitudes, but forget not to fortify your weak- 
nesses with compensating culture. 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 1 75 

V. The next rule to be offered is, Never rest 
with the mere recollection of facts, but reach 
after the comprehension of principles. The solu- 
tion of a multitude of difficult questions empiri- 
cally affords no help towards settling any new 
inquiries which may arise. But he who has 
mastered their principle holds the open secret in 
his hand, and can unhesitatingly read off the 
answers. Here is the distinction between the 
sciolist and the sage, the philosopher and 
the quack. One explains the reason, the other 
at best can only set forth the fact. In the long 
run, fundamental thoroughness alone is true 
speed. If the charlatan, who acts by rote, from 
a superficial remembrance of instances, some- 
times does well, he can never be safe. A fatal 
test question may at any time put him to con- 
fusion. But the proficient, who acts by science, 
from insight of laws, is sure of his ground, and 
not at the mercy of chance. 

The true student will not stop at a mere phe- 
nomenon, but will endeavor to learn what is im- 
plied by it. He will investigate its antecedents, 



176 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

its concomitants, and its sequences, so as to in- 
fer all that it is capable of teaching. Sometimes, 
when beholding a black spot glide across the 
yellow cornfield you may know, without looking 
up, that a cloud is passing ; or, at another time, 
without seeing him, that a crow sails above. 
To get things by memory, and not by reason, 
to take traditions and assertions on blind author- 
ity, beyond what is needful under your limita- 
tions and appropriate modesty, is like stealing 
the answers to your sums from another's slate, 
or copying them from a key, instead of working 
them out and verifying them for yourself. To 
drop in prostration before an altar, merely be- 
cause you see others doing so, is only a form of 
social apery : for it to become religion, the rev- 
erential hinges of the knees must fall in spon- 
taneous response to an original apprehension of 
something divine. 

VI. Always prefer the positive and loving ex- 
ercise of the faculties to their negative or dis- 
liking action. To love and worship, to desire 
and receive, is to live more and endure longer ; 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 1 77 

but to reject and despise, is to live less and 
perish sooner. Wisdom and gladness dwell with 
him who chooses chiefly to contemplate things 
true and beautiful and good ; folly, meanness, 
and odiousness will be found to be the comrades 
of the man whose vision preferentially selects 
what is false, ugly, and bad. The different forms 
of sympathy, admiration, reverence, and enthu- 
siasm are the feelers of the soul, by which we 
appropriate nutrition and sustain a growing life. 
If we have only disgusts, scorns, hatreds, and 
wearinesses as exploring tentacles, we cease to 
nourish our spirits, and finally die of disenchant- 
ment and inanition. And this is the most 
lamentable of all deaths, perishing from want 
of incentive to live. He who neither desires 
nor admires any thing has no reason for con- 
tinuing alive. 

VII. But this rule, to cultivate ingenuous faith 
and affection, needs to be complemented with 
another. Avoid that quivering sensitiveness 
which wastes the treasures of the heart in re- 
senting fancied slights, or in brooding over 



178 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

secret hurts and unmet demands. Those in- 
trusted with the perilous gift of an excessive 
sensibility are in double danger ; for they may 
be destroyed by denial or devoured by indul- 
gence. Many a man of a lavishly generous and 
asking nature has been sapped and ruined by 
his own too-deep tenderness. Rebuffed, neg- 
lected, deceived, he has inwardly wept and bled 
to death ; for sentiment is spiritual blood, and the 
depletion of it, in baffled and pining lonesome- 
ness, slowly proves mortal. So, too, has many 
another, of kindred stamp, moulded of a finer 
clay and tuned to a richer music than ordinary, 
found the cup of life too intoxicating, and, quaff- 
ing it over eagerly, his nerves have melted away, 
in dissolving thrills. The intensity of delight 
is to such souls even more fatal than the bitter- 
ness of disappointment. They need, as protec- 
tion, a stoic regimen, self-administered. They 
must think and will more, dream and feel less. 
Emotion must be transmuted mto intellection. 

Reason calms, while feeling perturbs, the soul. 
Steady insight, resolutely sought, can allay and 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 1 79 

guide the storms of imagination and sense. Ah, 
yes, he who is made three parts silk, fire, 
and velvet should have the fourth part steel ! 
Else he will be too soft for this fierce, hard 
world. An illustration is seen in Angelo and 
Goethe, living with vigorous fertility beyond 
their fourscore years, as contrasted with Ra- 
phael and Schiller, perishing before their beau- 
tiful morning had closed. 

Undue preponderance and indulgence in any 
part of our triple nature is prejudicial to force 
and longevity ; a balanced action of all the parts, 
conducive to them. The fund of power may be 
dissolved in sensuality, frozen in intellectuality, 
or evaporated in emotionality ; but it is glorified 
and preservingly reproduced only when it is 
expended aright in the fulfilment of harmonious 
uses. Subdue sensuous impulse by rational 
principle, and make joy a consequence but not 
an aim, is, therefore, the rule for converting the 
sentimental weakling into the invincible war- 
rior. And this is one of the constant miracles 
wrought by gentle, shrinking, aspiring natures, 



l8o THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

who train their delicacy into firmness by con- 
secrating self to God. 

VIII. Recognize the immense superiority of 
life to literature, of breathing persons over 
printed volumes. To experience the charms of 
the material universe in all their original aspects, 
and the treasures of the human soul in all their 
endless diversity, is a direct privilege offered 
to every one of us. But to realize it we must 
bring to the work free and undepraved faculties, 
eager for the immediate apprehension of the 
true, the beautiful, and the good, in their own 
facts, wherever they are to be found. He who 
most cultivates independent thought and affec- 
tion of his own, who cherishes solitude that in 
it he may lie passively expectant and open to 
the Infinite Spirit, free from egotistic bias or 
taint, disinterestedly asking to be taught and 
moulded, — is the one to derive the greatest ben- 
efit also from the recorded experiences of others. 

But at the present time, and growingly so, 
multitudes are so absorbed in reading what 
others have written, that they have no time or 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. l8l 

strength left for any thing else. The bookworm 
is a sorrowful perversion of humanity. All fresh- 
ness of joy, all fruitfulness of vigor, is taken out 
of this shrivelled mummy. What should be his 
staff becomes his tyrant. He is prematurely 
bent and wrinkled and mildewed. And all for 
what ? For nothing but a slavish obedience to 
a mechanical habit, or else for the empty chaff 
and name of learning. Many a person, once 
gifted with faculties of vivid bloom, reads three 
or four newspapers daily, half a dozen magazines 
weekly, twenty or thirty reviews a month, and 
two or three hundred volumes a year ; and the 
whole of it becomes to him only an indistinct 
mass of rubbish blowing through his mind, leav- 
ing but a dust of weariness and depression. It 
is a lamentable mistake. A twentieth part of 
the reading, and nineteen parts more of medi- 
tation, quietude, prayer, observation, experiment, 
would lead to results unspeakably preferable. 

Especially desirable is it that such a slave to 
sedentary seclusion and printed pages should be 
induced to go forth into the tonic embrace of 



1 82 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

'open nature, and seek the corrective discipline 
and inspiration of converse with his living fel- 
lows. To a man of sensitive and aspiring soul 
the temptations to *a bookish life are most seduc- 
tive. , The book makes no resistance. You can 
take it up or lay it down at will. You freely 
make your choice of them, consulting nothing 
but your own pleasure as to times and seasons. 
But the living man makes his demands on you. 
He reacts on you in accordance with your action 
on him. His qualities and yours often conflict. 
All the more valuable for this is the relationship 
between you and him. The frictions may polish 
as well as excite. Excess may supplement de- 
fect, and bias offset bias. The book is fixed and 
dead ; the man is alive and variable, a potential 
test and revelator of innumerable things. 

Still more strikingly is the constant and large 
intercourse of man with men indispensable as a 
means of training us in charity and catholicity. 
And the pain suffered from earnest miscellane- 
ous converse with society will be lessened, and 
the enjoyment increased, in even pace with our 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 1 83 

progress in subduing our own self-absorption 
and tremulous vanity, and forming the habit of 
studying all persons disinterestedly, in the light 
of universal principles, for the sake of universal 
ends. Human nature is never so sacred with 
inexhaustible claims, nor is life ever so intense 
and sublime in its interest, as when, having found 
something of God in ourselves, we go tirelessly 
among our fellow-creatures, seeking to find more 
of Him in them. He in whose chronic expe- 
rience the pages of a book are more fascinating 
and instructive than the presence of a human 
being has yet to learn one of the most fertile 
and profound lessons of practical wisdom. 

IX. Keep your working power at its maxi- 
mum. In our day of enlarged and intensified 
social connections, of exasperated vanity and 
ambition, there is no form of foolishness more 
frequent, or more fatal to all calm joy and grand 
endurance, than the habit of overtasking the 
forces of body and mind. He whose eyes have 
been opened, by a personal experience of the 
melancholy results of this habit, to observe his 



1 84 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

fellow-men, must be astonished at the number of 
those whose energies have been reduced to a 
chronic level far, far below their normal height, 
and whose work, in consequence, is sadly les- 
sened and deteriorated in quantity and quality, 
and their daily experience changed from an 
overflowing well of satisfaction to a thin dribble 
of misery and complaint. Their real life flutters 
and chafes in sad and grumbling incompetency 
against the demands of their ideal ; and the dis- 
parity breeds an incessant wretchedness. For 
in every organism meant to work easily under 
the accurately regulated pressure of a supply of 
power at its full head, but reduced to struggle 
laboriously in a condition twenty or fifty degrees 
below this, there is a profound sense of the 
dreadful disadvantage under which it is working. 
This discord engenders a gloom and a querulous- 
ness that fret and poison all the faculties and 
make happiness an impossibility. 

The most massive and central element of 
wisdom, in the care of our being and the guid- 
ance of our conduct, is to preserve health and 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 1 85 

strength at their full height, never suffering them 
to become permanently lowered by extravagant 
expenditures or by unconscious wastes. Guard 
your dynamic capital from loss. Efforts in 
sudden excess or too long sustained must be 
scrupulously avoided ; for they are apt so to 
drain away the nervous wealth as to produce 
an aching vacuum which stays in retributive 
fixture when the causal occasion has passed. 
Temperate exertions, with proper rests, illustrate 
in experience that law of all wholesome exercise, 
— moderate expenditures of force are immedi- 
ately returned with interest. 

There are, doubtless, sometimes, critical exi- 
gencies, supreme moments of duty, when our 
spiritual life is perfected and freed by sacrificing 
our physical life. But with this exception, which 
rarely occurs, it is the sovereign interest and 
obligation of every one to maintain his vital 
exaltation and energy unimpaired. Then he can 
do the best work, and the most of it, in the 
easiest manner and with the greatest enjoy- 
ment. What is finer than to see serenity smil- 



1 86 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

ingly throned on strength ? How few the ex- 
amples of it are becoming ! And how numerous 
the dismal instances of men whose forces are re- 
duced to the lowest ebb, and who feebly dawdle 
on in vain attempts to achieve their ends ! 
Their condition is like that of a man once reck- 
lessly spending an organic income of fifty thou- 
sand a year, but now reduced to the nervous and 
functional penury of living on five hundred a 
year. Their habits of work, no longer volun- 
tarily regulated by the law of fruitful spontane- 
ity, have run down to the level of an automatic 
slavery which ceaselessly spins their vitality 
away in restless frittering and ineffectual fuss. 

There is but one remedy, and that is for them 
to lower their consumption of force and raise 
their assimilation of it. By rest from mental 
worry and muscular effort, and by improved 
nutrition, they must give nature a chance to 
replenish the exhausted reservoirs. The devital- 
ized and irritable plodder, living impotently on 
the dregs of his impoverished nerves, may well 
subordinate everything else to the sacred work 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 1 87 

of restoring his dynamic tone. And it can be 
done. With the proper care and patience, res- 
olutely kept up, the wrecked and shrivelled 
organism may be readjusted and filled with 
fresh exuberance of power. And then, having 
learned from bitter experience its true value, 
what a divine luxury is the power of calm 
and happy fulfilment in every function at its 
highest pitch ! 

The birds in their average condition appear 
endowed with more common sense than we 
are ; for they do not overdraw their reserves of 
strength, but are so full of resilient life that their 
motions seem to dart from their centres as 
shedding quivers of electrical superfluity. Once 
in a great while we see a man or a woman with 
this godlike saturation of potency, every tissue 
and nerve surcharged with drenches of dynamic 
peace which the least stimulus thrills into puls- 
ing overflows of bliss. This state, once possessed, 
should be preserved with conscientious vigilance ; 
lost, should be held cheaply regained at the 
largest price any one can pay. Therefore, on no 



1 88 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

account, except at the command of God, suffer 
the power that drives the machinery of life to 
ebb down towards its minimum. 

X. Remember that the field of all experience, 
and of all the preparations for the improvement 
and extension of experience, is within your own 
breast. It is only within our own faculties that 
we are capable of experiencing any thing : with- 
out these we should be in the condition of a stone. 
How clearly, then, the nature and value of our 
life depend, year by year, on what we become in 
faith, feeling, and thought ! Man is subject to no 
more frequent or more obstinate fallacy than 
that of looking for great and costly experiences 
to be given to him from without. God and his 
innumerable forms of beauty, truth, and good 
no doubt exist outside of us and independently of 
us ; but it is perfectly certain that we can never 
know any thing of them, excepting as revealed 
within us by the developed activity and consent- 
ing grasp of our own conscious powers. Thus, 
by an insuperable necessity, despite the sophis- 
tical prejudice of sense peering after outward 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 189 

wonders, it is in the quiet and sacred privacy of 
the individual soul, before the sightless altar of 
its own faith and love, that the essential battles 
of destiny are to be fought, and the sacramen- 
tal mysteries of the universe celebrated. Here, 
therefore, in the withdrawn depths and seclusion 
of the private breast of each one, his supreme 
work waits to be done. To neglect this, dis- 
sipated in foreign affairs, is the veriest folly 
and fatuity of man. Can the acquisition of any 
piece of property compensate for the loss of 
peace of mind ? If the soul be really a divine 
mirror, before which unknown and incalculable 
realities are forever gliding in dim forms or 
shapeless clouds, we may well afford, now and 
then, to turn from external solicitations, and 
cleanse the glass, and watch the drifting scud, 
if, haply, through the vapor we may sometimes 
behold planets pass, or even suns burst into 
view. 

XI. See that every human consciousness is 
potentially infinite, and consequently that the 
sanction of duty and the charm of life are in- 



190 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

exhaustible. We may, by our own faults of 
excess or omission, become satiated and stupid ; 
but God can never be divested of his absolute 
mysteriousness, nor the spectacle of the universe 
be drained of its everlasting surprises. Every 
man is a door of infinitude. Some of these doors 
are opaque, some are transparent. When their 
hinges turn, and the openings confront each 
other, what revelations stream forth or are shut 
in ! The Creator says, — 

" I cause from every creature 
His proper good to flow ; 
As much as he is and doeth, 
So much he shall bestow." 

There is no limit to the experiences possible 
to be won by him who develops his soul to its 
utmost. Side by side two men may live and 
work, day after day, while illimitable leagues of 
difference estrange and dispart their interiors;] 
aspirations and fruitions occupying the one, of 
which the other has not the faintest hint. What 
unuttered and unutterable secrets go on in the 
mystic spacelessness of the personal spirit — 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 191 

diabolical combats, angelic banquets, ineffable 
touches and visions from the Holy Ghost — can 
only be guessed by each one from what he has 
himself known, or constructively imagined from 
the feebler echoes of literature. But in each, 
beyond the region of expression, is that mapless 
domain of the incommunicable, with whose aw- 
fulness of woes or enhancements of bliss no 
stranger can intermeddle. This is no truer in 
hortatory rhetoric than it is to competent reflec- 
tion ; for, according to the deepest theory of the 
deepest thinking of our race, man is the form of 
an infinite content, morality being the active, 
religion the emotional, and philosophy the specu- 
lative, effort to realize that content, or raise 
it out of abstract possibility into progressive 
consciousness. 

The grossness of materialism, the vulgarity of 
infidelity, cannot again touch him whose in- 
teriors have been opened to these mysteries. 
And there is henceforth nothing too sublime for 
him to believe and to expect. When the un- 
known chords of a soul have once responded to 



192 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

the voice of God, speaking to it in its own time- 
less and boundless deep, it can never again deny 
its supersensual origin and destiny. Why are we 
never satisfied on earth ? Why, even in our 
most ecstatic joy, does there always mingle a 
profound and mysterious pain, an ineffable want? 
Ah, it is a tone from eternity, which we, pris- 
oners of time, recognize. It compels us to feel 
sad that a pleasure so divine should be so brief. 
And thus it prophesies our immortality. For 
we cannot possibly suppose that the Creator 
taunts his creatures with the evanescent frag- 
ments of bliss he flings them. 

XII. Finally, Be your own severest critic. 
Fail not to feel that the fittest object for your 
criticism is always yourself and your defects. 
Whenever you perceive any new truth, let the 
first application of it be in testing your own 
traits, aims, and performances, to see wherein 
they fall short of the proper requirement, or 
diverge from the best possibility. The most 
prolific cause of the failure of the great multi- 
tude of men to reach the mark of their high 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 1 93 

calling, in character, attainments, skill, and pro- 
duction, is that they are blinded and drugged by 
the delusions of self-love. They do not appre- 
ciate their own faults and wants. They exag- 
gerate their own gifts and accomplishments. 
And so they rest contentedly at a low stage of 
excellence. They sink into ruts of passive 
habit, and there spend their life in a dull routine 
of mediocrity. 

One of the chief cures for this is to be found 
in an honest self-criticism, ever more vigilant 
and unsparing in the lash and spur it uses at 
home than in those it applies abroad. How 
frequent, and how destructive to all fresh and 
noble advancement, is the sway of a fond vanity 
or the load of a stagnant laziness, making their 
subject utterly incapable of a just estimate of 
himself in what he is and what he should be, in 
what he does and what he ought to do ! The 
remedy is at hand, if he will make careful in- 
spections of his condition and performance, at 
short intervals, compare the results with keen 
impartiality, and revise his methods and guide 
13 



194 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

his efforts, ever anew, in accordance with the 
insight thus gained. 

He can also get most important help to an 
accurate perception of his precise stage of prog- 
ress, his exact defects and merits and wants, by- 
comparing his achievements with those of other 
men, his rivals, friends, associates, strangers. 
When this is done without egotism or envy, 
done in a modest and generous spirit of im- 
provement, it is of invaluable service in clearing 
the sight and stimulating the will. Comparison 
for the sake of a carping criticism of others is a 
vulgar vice ; but when practised by us for the 
purpose of purifying and enriching ourselves, 
and enabling us to help others, it is an exalted 
use and virtue. 

We must not compare ourselves with others 
in order to fix our relative grades of worth, but 
only to see what useful thing we can learn, what 
good we can receive or impart. As the deep 
Hedge has said, " God alone knows how much 
any man is worth." We should, therefore, leave 
the question of our comparative ranks to Him 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 1 95 

alone. To criticise ourselves is always becoming 
and profitable. But pride prefers the unseemly 
office of criticising others, and is forced to pay 
the penalty. For he who takes the interior at- 
titude of an inferior, and humbly studies to learn 
all he can from every one, will become a superior ; 
while he who always plays the superior, will for- 
ever remain an inferior. 

We find it, usually, a fixed attribute of the 
unregenerate man that his first instinctive move- 
ment is an impulse to combat or reject every 
suggestion from others. Much conventional 
learning, or prolonged literary training, is not 
only not a help, but is a positive obstacle, both to 
inspiration in one's self, and to recognition of it 
in others. Bishop Home met the claims of Jacob 
Behmen, as advanced by William Law, with a 
depreciating, if not contemptuous, rebuff. How 
much fitter and how much more beneficial would 
it have been for that miffed dignitary if he had 
opened his soul with assimilative fairness to the 
divinely inspired shoemaker ! For what was 
Bishop Home in comparison with Jacob Beh- 



I96 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

men ? Less than a midget to an eagle, a fly 
buzzing over a leaf to a condor floating above 
Chimborazo. The prelate had social promi- 
nence, literary equipment, and a mitre : the poor 
obscure cobbler was God-possessed, and saw the 
heavens and hells unrolling. 

The man who would steadily rise in goodness, 
charm, and power, needs not merely to fix his 
impartial critical attention on himself and what 
he is doing ; but, furthermore, he must strive in 
every possible manner to perfect the standard by 
which his criticising judgments are regulated. 
That is to say, if he has not in his mind a clear 
ideal soliciting him beyond his actual, he will 
surely stop where he is, or retrograde into deeper 
inferiority. Here is touched, on its quick, the 
secret of the ruin of many a painful votary of 
ambition. A singer, of good abilities, who be- 
lieved he had discovered a new and better 
method of vocalization, was so possessed by a 
desire for transcendent excellence in his art that 
he practised, almost incessantly, eight, ten, 
twelve hours in the day, month after month, 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 1 97 

year after year. By such a deadly mechanical 
excess of effort he wearied and wore his organs 
down to the lowest pitch. He hammered and 
jumped his voice, shouted and rattled his very 
brains out. But he pleased himself with the 
dreary delusion that he was fast becoming an in- 
comparable master of song ; although, in fact, his 
rasping and shattered tones were a torture to 
every ear but his own. He spent his closing days 
in a lunatic asylum, paralyzed and demented, yet 
to the very last assured that he should soon be 
the first singer on the earth, the most admired 
of all mankind. The case is an extreme one, 
but typical of a whole class. What is needed to 
prevent such a mournful perversion is, first, a 
comparative criticism constantly clarified by an 
unshrinking discrimination of the facts of the 
case ; and, second, the moderation and direc- 
tion of effort by a sound ideal ahead of the 
fulfilment. This would make self-deception, and 
a delirious contentment with mediocrity, im- 
possible. 

A perfected ideal of what a man ought to be 



I98 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

and of what the world should become, held 
vividly in the mind, is at once a glorious 
safeguard and a permanent inspiration. It will 
inspire its possessor with an unappeasable wish 
to exemplify in living action, in his own person, 
what it requires. Employing him in the exact- 
ing and generous task of outgrowing his im- 
perfections and acquiring with each added year 
a purer dignity, a deeper peace, a richer benefi- 
cence, a more adequate culture and faith, it will 
preserve him from all temptation to a waspish 
censure of others, or a cynical undervaluation 
of existence. He will seek the renovation of 
society, It is true ; but he will take no pessimistic 
view of its present state. Busy in making him- 
self an orderly part in the general scheme, 
pleased with experiences progressive in their 
harmony, he will cherish the happiest hopes for 
the future of his race on earth. But, on the 
contrary, misgivings and censorious dislikes are 
native growths of the temper of him who neg- 
lects himself. 

It is easier to put your foot in a shoe than it is 



RULES IN THE SCHOOL. 199 

to cover the world with leather, although the re- 
sult be practically the same. The reformer who 
spends his time in launching bitter criticisms 
on the existing order of things, tries to cover 
the world with leather ; and his bare feet are 
blistered by the flints. The reformer who de- 
votes every energy to making himself all that 
he ought to be as a part of the whole, puts 
his foot in a shoe ; and finds it comfortable 
walking. 

In truth, the worst essence of evil is nothing 
but a reflex from the dissonant finite spirit. If 
God is an absolute and infinite perfection there 
can be no substantial evil, only an appearance of 
it. The good man made wise sees this, and is 
calm and blessed. With an unquailing courage, 
with an adamantine poise of reason and faith, 
he confronts the black and confused phenomena 
of life, and his eye-beam looks the dizzy maze 
into a lucidity of order from which every shadow 
melts away. 



200 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

EPITOME OF THE RULES. 

Have an object in view. Make no skips. Be- 
ware of errors. Nurse your slimmest gifts with 
greatest care. Reach beyond all word-smatter- 
ing, and grasp substantial truth. Rest not in 
negations but pass to positive good. Girdle 
sensibility with intellect and will, lest its softness 
undermine manhood. Recognize the incompa- 
rable superiority of the substance of life to its 
literary expression. Keep your vital energy at 
it's full height. Remember that the scene of ex- 
perience and the work of duty for each one lie 
within his own soul. Perceive that every human 
being is a focus of immensity, and his conscious- 
ness capable of indefinite expansion. All the 
way through your course be a faithful student of 
yourself, criticising yourself in the light of the 
highest standards. 

Such are some of the principal rules for direct- 
ing the members of this teeming school of the 
earth through the momentous term-time of their 
life. As the pupils observe or neglect these, 



EPITOME OF THE RULES. 201 

and the like rules, they will progress or lag, be 
bright models and leaders, or sottish dolts and 
fags. The distinctive value of such rules ob- 
viously lies in the fact that they concentrate and 
transmit the results of the collective experience of 
the past. The docile disciple who appropriates 
the fruits and the processes achieved by his pred- 
ecessors should improve with far greater rapidity 
than they could ; as mathematicians, since the 
day of Napier, add or subtract the convenient 
logarithms instead of multiplying or dividing the 
cumbrous numbers. But insensible and careless 
students, taking no advantage of the helpful ap- 
purtenances of apparatus, examples, and methods, 
which the contributions of foregone generations 
have arranged in the school, are but little better 
off as learners than their ancestors were. To 
reap the fullest benefit of having had an ancestry, 
they must transmute the ancestral experience 
and its generalized rules afresh into their own 
living faculties and action. To exalt truisms into 
truths is the office of genius ; to degrade truths 
into truisms, the function of vulgarity. 



202 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

The diagrams hung through nature and society 
are as different to a thoughtful scholar and a 
reckless idler as a page of printed characters is 
to one who can read and one who cannot. But 
meanwhile there "is one great truth which may be 
used both for warning and for encouragement, 
namely, that to all pupils, in the schools of all 
worlds and lives, the rewards and punishments, 
promotions and degradations, acquisitions and 
failures, depend primarily on themselves. Wher- 
ever on the globe a man stands, a vertical line 
passing through his position will coincide with 
an axis of the earth and the apex of the sky ; so 
that all things revolve around him as a centre, 
and open into his faculties in proportion to his 
sensibility and attention. To him who earnestly 
tries to do his best every object is a teacher, 
and every event an admonition ; every hour 
presents some new lesson of virtue, some fresh 
knowledge of truth ; and at every examination he 
may have the joy of finding that he has made 
additional conquests of wisdom and nobleness. 



CONCLUSION. 203 



CONCLUSION. 



The daily employment of a man is the most 
important force in his education, although it is 
the least thought of in this light. Our actions 
and the organic attitudes which they imply are 
of prime influence in moulding our characters. 
The educational agency second in rank is the 
power of example, the actions we see others 
perform. The third and weakest influence, 
although the one most relied on, is precept, 
maxims inculcated by printed page or living 
voice. 

Perhaps the most valuable direction which 
can be given to an aspirant is this : Aim al- 
ways at a rounded consistency of purpose and 
method and motive, unmarred by flaws and 
contradictions. All who desire great excellence 
and power, .but in vain, fail through inconsis- 
tency or unfitness somewhere. The essence of 
weakness, as well as of unclean'ness, is incon- 
gruity. As Martineau, the high master of all 



204 THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. 

who study conscience, has said, with his won- 
drous felicity of verbal touch, "The heavens 
look down on no sadder sight than the slug- 
gard and the slattern at their prayers." All 
things in keeping, is the law of purity and of 
power. 

The great question for each one now and ever 
to ask himself is, What am I learning? For 
while some, with temptation and evil for teachers, 
are at the degrading tasks -of sin, others, under the 
instruction of virtuous example or the impulse of 
a sacred zeal, are mastering every divine lesson 
in the world. Let an aspirant discriminate the 
good teachers and lessons from the vicious ones, 
let him endeavor, in that great school of design 
which the present state is, to execute the pattern 
of a useful and blessed life, and every day he 
shall finish some worthy toil, and leave no oc- 
casion empty of a profit which is prophetic. In 
the vision of his faith this world shall appear but 
the primary apartment, where infant scholars 
are learning to lisp and to spell easy words. 
Nor will he deem his education more than begun, 



CONCLUSION. 205 

even when graduating from time, decked with 
the highest diplomas of earth. For he shall then 
expect, ushered into the school of eternity, to-be 
matriculated with the angels of heaven, whose 
divine employment is the endless learning of 
endless lessons in the fresh transmutation of 
love and wisdom into use and joy under the 
guidance of the infinite Teacher. 



University Press : John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



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